Bavovna

US company with Ukrainian roots, headquartered in Charleston, South Carolina, that develops AI-based hybrid inertial navigation for unmanned systems operating without GPS and under electronic warfare.

Bavovna Inc. is headquartered in Charleston, South Carolina, and describes itself as a US company with a combined American and Ukrainian team. The team was previously based in Kyiv and, after the Russian full-scale invasion, turned from AI applications in medicine to navigation for drones in electronic warfare environments. Bavovna is registered under ITAR as a manufacturer, exporter and broker. In 2023 it was the first Ukrainian start-up admitted to the US Air Force Labs MassChallenge programme; in November 2024 it reported total seed funding of US$2.7 million.

The core product is a hybrid inertial navigation system (H-INS), sold as the AI Autonomy Kit. The 800-gram unit combines an inertial measurement unit, edge computing, an ArduPilot-based flight controller and an EMI-protected enclosure, and fuses accelerometer, gyroscope, compass, barometer and airflow data to navigate without GNSS or maps; it can also feed synthetic GPS coordinates to an existing autopilot. The company names VTOL, multirotor, fixed-wing, interceptor and naval platforms as targets. In January 2025 it demonstrated an autonomous return-to-launch over a 7.8 km route without GPS to US military experts in Tampa, Florida. Further products include the AirTower, the AirFlow Sensor, the SeaDrone and the Carolina DroneHub.

In October 2026 Czechoslovak Group, through its subsidiary Excalibur International, signed a cooperation and channel partnership agreement with Bavovna to market its autonomy and navigation products internationally for aerial, surface and subsurface unmanned vehicles. Bavovna has also worked with Aurelia Aerospace on an airborne SIGINT drone using non-GNSS navigation.