Advanced Navigation has appointed former British Army officer David Leniewski as Managing Director for Europe, the Middle East and Africa to spearhead the expansion of its deep-tech operations following a year of triple-digit growth.
The expansion comes at a critical time for regional infrastructure, as global navigation satellite system (GNSS) jamming and spoofing have become daily operational realities across Eastern Europe and the Middle East. According to the International Air Transport Association (IATA), jamming events increased by 67 percent from 2023 to 2025, while spoofing incidents rose by 193 percent. These disruptions cause autonomous systems to halt, ships to steer off course, and military assets to misdirect, with a total GNSS outage estimated to cost the United Kingdom economy £1.4 billion every single day.
Advanced Navigation Chief Revenue Officer Christopher McNamara believes Leniewski is the right leader for the right moment, commenting, “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,
“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.”
Leniewski brings extensive leadership experience across the defence, aerospace, and high-reliability interconnect sectors, combining frontline operational military service with senior commercial roles. He served over a decade in the British Army, gaining frontline operational experience and deep insight into defence requirements and mission-critical environments. His commercial background includes serving as Business Unit Director EMEA at Smiths Interconnect, where he led regional strategy for high-reliability connectivity solutions across the medical, semiconductor, and aerospace sectors. Additionally, he supported global military vehicle programmes at Ultra Electronics, led sales and marketing for defence programmes across North-West Europe at Moog, and focused on military-grade interconnect solutions at Amphenol.
“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.“
This appointment follows Advanced Navigation’s £83 million Series C funding 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. To address these demands, the company 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 aims to serve as the catalyst of the autonomy revolution by transforming deep research into deployable systems that enable humanity to operate with confidence in environments once considered unreachable.
