Where Nestwave's EIC Accelerator IoT GPS Software Stands Today

A GPS receiver is normally a chip of its own, and in a battery-powered tracker that chip is one of the biggest drains on the battery. Nestwave, a Paris start-up registered in September 2014, set out to remove it: its software turns the radio and processor already inside a cellular IoT modem into a satellite positioning receiver, and hands the heaviest calculations to a cloud server. In the European Innovation Council's January 2020 round the company was selected for blended finance, a grant plus equity, according to the Commission's list of selected companies, which names Nestwave alone for its project, with no partner companies.

The grant was €2,108,925 towards a €3,012,750 project that ran from 1 September 2020 to 31 August 2022, according to CORDIS. Two months after it ended, on 31 October 2022, the American location company NextNav acquired Nestwave for a gross consideration of $19.3 million, according to NextNav and GPS World. The French company still exists, now under the name NextNav France.

Where Nestwave Stands Now

Nestwave no longer exists as an independent company. NextNav paid $4.3 million in cash and $15.0 million in its own shares, put the enterprise value at $18.0 million, and said all Nestwave employees stayed; chief executive Ambroise Popper became NextNav's general manager for France and founder Rabih Chrabieh its vice president of engineering. The French company filed a change of name to NextNav France in February 2023 and moved its head office from Neuilly-sur-Seine to Puteaux in December 2023, according to its notices in the official BODACC gazette. The French company register lists it as active, with NextNav Holdco France as its president and Mickael Thomas as managing director.

NextNav did not buy all of it at once. Its annual report for 2025 says warrants held by the selling shareholders were bought out with 591,658 NextNav shares in October 2023 and 397,037 shares in May 2024, after which NextNav owned all of NextNav France. The same report lists Puteaux as one of five NextNav sites and says the French and Indian locations "are focused on software development and research and development functions". The last accounts, for 2025, were filed in July 2026.

The Technology: A GPS Receiver Without a GPS Chip

A conventional tracker carries a cellular modem to send data and a separate satellite navigation (GNSS) chip to find its position. Nestwave's software runs the GNSS receiver on the modem chip's existing radio and digital signal processor, and splits the work between the device and Nestwave's cloud, which completes the position fix. The CORDIS results article quotes Popper calling the combination "a real breakthrough in the IoT geolocation landscape". The project objective claimed 2.5 times the accuracy and one tenth of the power consumption of GNSS solutions at one third of the cost; those comparisons are the company's own and no independent benchmark of them was found.

The approach follows a path the EU's own satellite navigation bodies describe. A white paper of the European GNSS Agency on power-efficient positioning for the IoT, summarised by the European GNSS Service Centre, names sending measurements "to an external facility with no power restrictions" and short "snapshot" receiver activity as the two ways to cut the power that positioning consumes. Nestwave's distinction was to do this in software on chips already in the device, rather than in an added component.

What the EIC Project Promised, and What CORDIS Shows

The CORDIS objective set three tasks: take the solution to technology readiness level 8, test its performance, and scale up to a commercial organisation. It also promised to add Galileo, BeiDou, 5G and Wi-Fi to the GPS and 4G signals the product used at the time, and forecast €27 million in revenue by 2025 and "over 300 jobs created (directly and indirectly)". The final periodic report says new constellations, 4G/5G and Wi-Fi support and EGNOS and WAAS augmentation were added, that the software was integrated on commercial IoT chipsets, and that results exceeded the initial targets for accuracy, time to first fix, sensitivity and power. It counts 18 patents, 10 granted and 8 pending.

The integration claim is backed outside the report. In December 2021 Sequans Communications announced low-power GNSS on its Monarch 2 GM02SP LTE-M/NB-IoT module, saying it "leverages Nestwave technology" and naming the French tracker maker Invoxia as one of the first customers to use it instead of an external GNSS chip. GPS World reported that Cosmo Connected, an urban mobility company, had also adopted the module for its trackers. In July 2022 Nestwave said Renesas would use its NestCore IP in a forthcoming module based on Monarch 2, quoting a Renesas marketing director.

1. Product at TRL 8, integrated in commercial chipsDeliveredShipped in the Sequans GM02SP module, per Sequans and GPS World.
2. Galileo, BeiDou, 5G and Wi-Fi signalsSelf-reportedListed as added in the final report; no independent test found.
3. Performance above targetsSelf-reportedThe report gives no figures, only that targets were exceeded.
4. €27M revenue by 2025Not achievedThe French entity's turnover peaked at €2.81M in 2024.
5. Over 300 jobsNot achieved18 staff in France at the end of 2022; 10 to 19 in 2024.

The project ran to its planned end date. The technology goal was met in the sense that matters most for an IP vendor: a chipmaker shipped it. The commercial goals were not, and the company was sold before it could show whether licensing alone would have produced the revenue it forecast.

The Money

Before the EIC award, Nestwave raised €2.0 million from Sofimac Innovation and The Faktory in April 2019, according to tech.eu; BODACC records capital increases in April and May 2019. In April 2021 it announced a €2.4 million round from the European Innovation Council and the two existing investors, with a quote from EIC Fund investment committee member Martin Bruncko; Venture Capital Journal reported the same amount. How much of it came from the EIC Fund was not disclosed, and BODACC shows no capital increase notice in 2021, so the form of the investment cannot be read from the register. Neither Nestwave nor NextNav France appears in the EIC Fund's current list of invested companies, checked across all 16 pages in October 2026.

The filed accounts, summarised in the INPI ratios dataset, show a company living on research money until the sale. Turnover was zero in 2019 and 2020, €104,815 in 2021 and €63,788 in 2022, while the net loss reached €1,851,609 in 2022. That record does not match the CORDIS objective, which says the company had "generated €360k from proof of concept projects" in the preceding 12 months; the dataset may book such income outside turnover, but the filings do not show where. From 2023 turnover rose to €2,329,048, then €2,811,487 in 2024 and €2,297,066 in 2025, with net profits of €808,080 and €588,839 in the last two years. The public data does not say whether that turnover came from outside customers or from NextNav itself.

For NextNav, the price was mostly paper. Its 2022 annual report records $16.3 million of goodwill from the acquisition and says Nestwave "has been substantially integrated into existing TerraPoiNT engineering and technology efforts", TerraPoiNT being the land-based positioning system that the 2025 report describes as operating "like a land-based GPS satellite constellation".

What Happened to the Product

NextNav bought Nestwave for its LTE and 5G positioning know-how, not mainly for its IoT business. Its chief executive said the deal would help it "optimize further the use of its existing spectrum bandwidth", and NextNav said combining Nestwave's technology with its own would cut expected deployment costs by about 75%, in excess of $250 million. NextNav's 2025 annual report describes a company focused on moving its positioning service to 5G New Radio in the Lower 900 MHz band in the United States, subject to an FCC petition. No NextNav announcement of new IoT chip licensing deals for the former Nestwave software since the acquisition could be found, and nestwave.com now redirects to NextNav's website.

Why Europe Should Care

Satellite positioning for small connected devices is an EU priority because it is where Galileo meets the mass market. The EU Agency for the Space Programme calls the IoT "one of the world's largest application markets" for GNSS and funds work to bring Galileo-enabled IoT trackers to the mass market. Nestwave's final report says it added new constellations to its software, which the EIC objective named as Galileo and BeiDou, and Sequans offered the result to tracker makers such as France's Invoxia.

The ownership is now American. The patents and the team that the EU grant and the EIC Fund helped finance sit in a subsidiary of NextNav, a US company whose stated strategy is a terrestrial backup to GPS for the United States. The engineering work stays in Puteaux, according to NextNav's own filings. Whether that counts as an EIC success, an exit that returned the EIC Fund's money, or a European capability that moved abroad depends on figures the EIC has not published: what the Fund invested and what it received.

The Verdict

Nestwave, NextNav and the EIC have not been asked for comment for this article. It is based entirely on public records, company statements and EU project data, linked throughout.