As Co-Founder and CTO of NextNav, Arun Raghupathy leads the company’s direction in technology innovation and engineering development. Currently he’s guiding the development of NextNav’s next-generation Positioning, Navigation & Timing (PNT) technology, which leverages more than a decade of innovation and incorporates 5G broadband radio access technology and advanced positioning reference signals – designed to meet the demands of an increasingly PNT-reliant world. Arun played a pivotal role in architecting NextNav’s 3-D PNT solutions and services, contributing to foundational IP and driving system, hardware, and software design. He holds more than 50 patents.
Before co-founding NextNav, Arun spent over a decade at Qualcomm and Texas Instruments. At Qualcomm, he contributed to transmitter design and helped develop the first CDMA direct-conversion chipset for mobile handsets. At Texas Instruments, he led the GPS systems team in the development and implementation of advanced GPS signal processing techniques used in smartphone multi-radio chipsets.
Arun received the 2024 Distinguished Alumni Award from the University of Maryland’s Department of Electrical & Computer Engineering. He holds a Ph.D. and M.S. in Electrical Engineering from UMD and a B.Tech. from IIT Madras.