GPS was built in the ’70s for Cold War combat, not Tesla autopilot or drone swarms dodging skyscrapers. It’s slow, weak, and too damn polite for the digital battlefield we’re living in now. If GPS is your granddad’s flip phone, Xona Space Systems is the quantum iPhone carving signals from space with sub-10cm accuracy and a signal so strong it punches through concrete like Tyson in ‘88.
Xona just pulled in a $92 million Series B, bringing total funding to $150 million, to take its PULSAR satellite navigation constellation from ambitious to absolutely inevitable. Craft Ventures led the charge, with Sky Dayton, the guy who made EarthLink a household name and sold startups to Amazon and SpaceX, taking a seat on the board. Also backing the orbit: Stellar Ventures, Seraphim Ventures, Toyota Ventures, Future Ventures, First Spark, Industrious Ventures, and NGP Capital. That’s not a cap table, that’s a rocket fuel recipe.
Let’s be clear: this isn’t just a prettier GPS. PULSAR hits with 100x stronger signal strength, centimeter-level accuracy, spoof-proof encryption, and sub-nanosecond timing. You could run a drone convoy through a canyon with this thing and still get home before the Uber driver figures out which driveway is yours. With Huginn successfully demoed in 2022 and Pulsar-0 launched just last week, this isn’t vaporware. It’s orbiting.
At the center of this gravitational pull is a crew of Stanford minds who swapped lab coats for launch codes. Brian Manning, ex-SpaceX and now CEO, brings the structural backbone. Tyler Reid, CTO and GPS whisperer from Stanford’s famed GPS Lab, took the math and made it move. Alongside them: Bryan Chan, Adrien Perkins, Jerami Martin, Kazuma Gunning, Paul Tarantino, and Andrew Neish, eight engineers turned entrepreneurs who saw the holes in legacy navigation and decided to fill them with satellites.
They’ve got contracts with the U.S. Space Force, AFRL, Lockheed Martin, and Spirent. A $20 million STRATFI award from SpaceWERX just gave them even more propulsion. Revenue’s climbing. Headcount’s up 62%. And the address? Still 828 Airport Blvd in Burlingame, CA, but their ambitions stretch pole to pole.
Business takeaway? You don’t outpace giants by yelling louder, you build your own signal. Xona didn’t pitch “a better GPS.” They proved that the future needs a whole new layer of space infrastructure and then launched it themselves.
Autonomous vehicles. Smart mines. Next-gen defense. Xona isn’t following a map. They’re launching the compass.
