Xona, a California startup building a satellite navigation network in low Earth orbit, has raised $250 million at a $2.45 billion valuation. Steve Jurvetson’s Future Ventures led the Series D, Xona said on Thursday.
The round comes seven months after a $170 million Series C. It takes Xona’s total funding since 2019 past $570 million. Future Ventures put in $78.5 million, Forbes reported.
“We started the year with technically an empty warehouse, and now we have a functional satellite factory,” Brian Manning, Xona’s co-founder and chief executive, told Forbes.
Manning, a former SpaceX engineer, said the company had not planned to raise again so soon. It did so after a surge in demand, he said.
A commercial rival to GPS
Xona’s network, called Pulsar, is built to run alongside GPS, which the US government operates. The company says Pulsar’s signals are up to 100 times more powerful than GPS and accurate to the centimetre. It says they resist jamming and can reach receivers indoors.
Billions of devices rely on signals that can be jammed or spoofed, Xona said. Updating government systems is slow and costly, it added.
Its test satellite, Pulsar-0, went up last year. Since then Xona has run more than 500 transmissions and shown accuracy better than two centimetres, Manning wrote in a company blog post. He said existing commercial receivers can pick up the signal without hardware changes.
In August, the Federal Communications Commission authorised Xona’s constellation. The company calls it the first and only such licence for a private navigation network operating alongside government systems.
Six satellites up, service in 2027
This month Xona launched six Pulsar satellites, its largest launch so far. Four will support beta service in several countries from early 2027. Xona designed and built the other two entirely in-house, at its factory in Burlingame, California. They will test the design for the full constellation, which Manning said is meant for production at several satellites a week.
“In just over a year, the company has advanced from a validation mission to deploying the foundation of an entirely new global navigation network,” said Steve Jurvetson, co-founder of Future Ventures.
Jurvetson, a longtime SpaceX board member, has backed only three space companies: SpaceX, Planet and Xona. They map onto the three main satellite markets, Forbes noted: communications, imaging the Earth and navigation.
Xona is not alone in scaling up in low Earth orbit. Amazon built its 1,000th Leo satellite this month for its broadband network. In Europe, Open Cosmos raised €300 million in September to scale satellite manufacturing. And this week, SpaceX’s quarterly results showed its AI business overtaking Starlink.