Inertial Labs

Inertial Labs makes orientation, positioning and navigation hardware in Paeonian Springs, Virginia, in the Loudoun County countryside outside Leesburg. Founded in 2001, it has built an unusually wide catalogue for a company its size, spanning bare sensors at one end and complete remote sensing payloads at the other.

The base of the range is components. TAG single, two and three-axis gyroscopes such as the SAG-150, TAG-207 and TAG-307 are tactical-grade MEMS parts intended for gimbal and platform stabilization. TAA three-axis accelerometers including the TAA-340 sit alongside them at navigation grade. DTS digital tilt and orientation sensors handle static and dynamic inclination measurement at the low-cost end.

One step up are the IMUs. The IMU-P is the long-running strapdown unit with roughly five microgravity bias stability, joined by the IMU-Kernel-110 and the IMU-FI-200. The AHRS line, covering the AHRS-II-P, miniAHRS and optoAHRS-II, adds heading, pitch and roll output for both motionless and dynamic use.

The INS family is the core product. These are GNSS-aided inertial navigation systems tracking GPS, GLONASS, Galileo and BeiDou on L1 and L2, computing position, velocity and full orientation for whatever they are bolted to. INS-DU and its INS-DU-OEM board version use a dual-antenna GNSS receiver and RTK corrections for centimeter positioning, INS-B is the compact variant, and INS-P uses an embedded gyro-compensated magnetic compass so it can still produce accurate heading when satellite signals are gone.

That leads into the APNT line, which is where the defense interest concentrates. Assured positioning, navigation and timing products including the INS-U, INS-NV and the VINS visual inertial sensor module are built for the case where GNSS cannot be trusted at all, using inertial data fused with visual and other alternative navigation references. Inertial Labs also supplies weapon orientation modules and equipment used for land and armored vehicle navigation and counter-UAS pointing in GNSS-denied conditions.

Marine work sits in the MRU and wave sensor lines. MRU-B1S, MRU-B2 and MRU-PD motion reference units measure pitch, roll, heave, sway, surge and acceleration for vessel and offshore platform use, with the WS-E and WS-PD wave sensors alongside. Rail has its own product, the RMCU railway motion control unit, which combines orientation with track motion parameters.

RESEPI is the odd one out and the most complete product in the catalogue. It is a LiDAR remote sensing payload instrument that packages an INS, a LiDAR scanner and processing into a single unit for point cloud generation, sold in configurations built around scanners including the XT-32M2X, and offered for private labeling by partners.

Ownership changed at the start of 2025. VIAVI Solutions, a network test and measurement company, agreed in December 2024 to buy Inertial Labs for 150 million dollars at closing plus up to 175 million dollars of contingent consideration over four years, and closed the deal in the first quarter of 2025. VIAVI framed it as an entry into aerospace, defense and industrial markets and expected the business to add around 50 million dollars of annual revenue.