Advanced Navigation Europe Expansion – Advanced Navigation, a global force in assured positioning, navigation and timing (PNT) for the world’s most extreme environments, today announced the appointment of David Leniewski as Managing Director for Europe, the Middle East and Africa (EMEA). After a year of triple-digit growth, Advanced Navigation is moving to own the European PNT market by ambitiously scaling its deep-tech operations to meet the surging demand.
The £1.4 Billion Problem Europe Can No Longer Ignore
Across Eastern Europe and the Middle East, GNSS jamming and spoofing are now a daily operational reality. IATA reported a 67% increase in jamming events from 2023 to 2025, while spoofing incidents rose by 193%. Autonomous systems are halting. Ships are being directed off course. Military assets are misdirected. A GNSS outage is estimated to cost the UK economy £1.4 billion every single day. The consequences are not technical footnotes – they are mission failures.
Speaking of the appointment, Advanced Navigation Chief Revenue Officer (CRO) Christopher McNamara believes Leniewski is the “right leader” for the “right moment”.
“The era of single-technology dependency is over. The question facing every defence program, every autonomous system integrator, and every critical infrastructure operator in the region is no longer if signal failure will affect them, but whether they will be ready when it does,” he said.
“With a track record of scaling dual-use technology across global markets, Leniewski brings a rare combination of operational credibility and commercial depth to the role. His time in the British Army gives him firsthand understanding of what resilient navigation means in contested environments – not as a systems specification, but as a lived experience. We are excited he’s joining us to translate that understanding into strong regional growth.”
The Right Leader for the Right Moment
Leniewski brings extensive leadership experience across the defence, aerospace and high-reliability interconnect sectors, with a career spanning both operational military service and senior commercial roles in global technology organisations.
- British Army: Served over a decade, gaining frontline operational experience and deep insight into defence requirements and mission-critical environments.
- Smiths Interconnect: Served as Business Unit Director EMEA, leading regional strategy for high-reliability connectivity solutions across the medical, semiconductor, and aerospace sectors.
- Ultra Electronics: Supported global military vehicle programmes, developing credible sales and marketing strategies and driving order intake to meet business unit growth targets.
- Moog: Led sales and marketing for defence programmes across North-West Europe, covering satellites, human-rated space vehicles, launch systems, missiles, military ground vehicles, naval vessels, and security and surveillance platforms.
- Amphenol: Focused on military-grade interconnect solutions for use across commercial aviation, defence, and space markets.
“The navigation industry has spent decades building on a single point of failure and calling it a system,” said Leniewski. “Advanced Navigation is one of the few companies willing to say that plainly, and more importantly, to do something about it.”
“Its technologies are not just commercially relevant. They are foundational to how defence and critical industries across EMEA will operate safely and autonomously in the years ahead. That is the work I want to be part of.”
Built for Extremes. Deployed at Scale
Leniewski’s appointment follows Advanced Navigation’s £83 million Series C raise, marking the next phase of the company’s global expansion. The EMEA region sits at the intersection of rising electronic warfare threats, accelerating autonomous system adoption across defence and industry, and growing government mandates for sovereign, GNSS-independent navigation capability.
Advanced Navigation is not entering this market blindly. It is embedding specialist engineering teams on the ground, building trusted regional capability, and expanding its sensor stack through targeted technology partnerships across robotics, photonics, vision, and quantum sensing.
“We are not just participating in the market,” said McNamara. “We are defining what assured navigation looks like for the next generation of autonomous systems. Europe is central to that.”
Founded on a culture of research and discovery, Advanced Navigation’s mission is to be the catalyst of the autonomy revolution. By transforming deep research into deployable systems, it is enabling humanity to operate with confidence in environments once considered unreachable.
For more information visit: www.advancednavigation.com.
