The phone in your pocket uses GNSS signals every day, whether you are opening a map, calling a taxi or sharing your location. Government systems such as the EU’s Galileo or US GPS provide this positioning and timing information at no cost. Yet recent conflicts have exposed the weakness of relying on signals that can be jammed. There have been cases where planes had issues landing due to jamming of GNSS signals.
New Space has solved problems where traditional space was too slow to keep up. First in satellite communications, then in Earth Observation. Now it is the turn of Global Navigation Satellite Systems (GNSS), and Xona has just received another vote of confidence.
The California startup, which is building a satellite navigation constellation in Low Earth Orbit (LEO), has raised $250 million in a Series D at a $2.45 billion valuation. The round comes seven months after a $170 million Series C and takes total funding since 2019 past $570 million.
Its constellation, called Pulsar, is built to run alongside other GNSS constellations. Xona says the signals are up to 100 times more powerful than GPS or Galileo, accurate to the centimetre, resistant to jamming and able to reach receivers indoors. Its test satellite, Pulsar-0, has run more than 500 transmissions and shown accuracy better than two centimetres, and existing commercial receivers can pick up the signal without hardware changes. In August, the FCC authorised the constellation, which Xona calls the first and only such licence for a private navigation network operating alongside government systems.
The challenge is adoption. With over 6 billion GNSS enabled devices in use, asking manufacturers to add incompatible hardware creates integration problems. GNSS is also so critical that an outage could cost more than $1 billion per day across North America. Xona’s answer is compatibility and speed. Its satellites are software defined with a flexible message structure, so new data products can be delivered without breaking earlier implementations.
This month, Xona launched six Pulsar satellites. Four will support beta service in several countries from early 2027. The other two were designed and built in house at its Burlingame factory to test the design for the full constellation, which is meant for production at several satellites a week.
Traditional space built the GNSS infrastructure the world depends on, and New Space provides higher accuracy and resilience. The business model is the next question. Governments will most likely be the primary customers, while many other commercial users could pay for the higher accuracy Pulsar provides. With basic positioning available at no cost, how many will choose to pay for precision and resilience? This is the billion (maybe trillion) dollar question.
Xona raises $250M at a $2.45B valuation to build a rival to GPS
https://thenextweb.com/news/xona-250m-series-d-gps-rival-low-earth-orbit
Engineering the Signal of Tomorrow for the Devices of Today
https://www.xonaspace.com/news/engineering-the-signal-of-tomorrow-for-the-devices-of-today
Pulsar receives first-of-its-kind FCC authorization for full deployment