Brian Manning

Every phone, tractor, drone and self-driving car leans on a set of satellites built in the 1970s and run by the U.S. military. GPS is a public utility that floats 20,000 kilometers overhead, broadcasting a signal so faint that a cheap transmitter on the ground can drown it out. Brian Manning's company exists to fix that, and it is doing it the hard way: by launching an entirely new constellation.

Manning is the co-founder and CEO of Xona Space Systems, headquartered in Burlingame, California. The product is called Pulsar, a commercial positioning, navigation and timing service beamed from small satellites in low-Earth orbit. Because those satellites fly roughly twenty times closer to Earth than GPS, their signal arrives about a hundred times stronger. Strong enough to punch through jamming. Encrypted enough to resist spoofing. Precise enough to put a moving vehicle on the right side of a lane line, not just the right block.

In March 2026 the company closed an oversubscribed $170 million Series C, led by Mohari Ventures Natural Capital, with Craft Ventures, ICONIQ, Woven Capital, NGP Capital, Samsung Next and Hexagon joining in. The money funds rapid satellite production at a new factory in Burlingame, plus teams in Montreal and London. The first U.S.-made production satellites are scheduled to launch by the end of 2026, with early commercial coverage as soon as 2027.

The company began as a reunion. Manning studied in Stanford's Aeronautics and Astronautics graduate program, and roughly a decade later eight of those classmates found themselves in the same room again. The catalyst was Domino's pizza and beer. As Manning tells it, "once there were eight of us in the room together, we started asking ourselves 'Why has nobody done this before?'"

The person who framed the gap was co-founder and CTO Dr. Tyler Reid. Reid had been working inside Ford's autonomous-vehicle program, where he kept running into the same wall: self-driving cars needed positioning far better than GPS could honestly deliver. His PhD had been about exactly this - building a new generation of navigation out of large constellations of small satellites. The thesis was the blueprint. The pizza-table reunion was the spark.

Manning's own path to that table was not a straight line through aerospace. He grew up around small family businesses, studied mechanical engineering at the Milwaukee School of Engineering, then spent three years as an engineering manager at Power Solutions International, deep in the world of industrial engines. He came back to space through SpaceX, where he was the responsible engineer for the Falcon 9 thrust structure - the part of the rocket that absorbs the force of nine engines at liftoff. Then came the MBA from London Business School, and then Xona.

That mix matters. Manning is not only a rocket engineer; he is a manufacturing and operations person who has shipped hardware in two industries. It shows up in how he talks about the business. Xona, he decided early, would build and broadcast from the satellites, and partner with chip and receiver companies for the ground side rather than try to own everything. Focus over empire.

He also comes at this from an entrepreneurial family background of small businesses, which colors the way he runs a company built on very large physics. He talks about space the way an operator talks about a supply chain - as a means to deliver a service efficiently to a lot of people at once, the way the oceans once let a handful of ships reach distant markets. The grand part is the orbit; the point is the customer on the ground.

Plenty of startups draw beautiful constellations on slides. Xona put one in orbit. In 2022 the company launched Huginn, a demonstration satellite named after one of the two ravens that, in Norse myth, flew across the world and reported back to Odin. It was the first commercial satellite navigation mission ever flown, and Xona went from concept to on-orbit in under twelve months.

Huginn was not a press-release prop. From orbit it broadcast what is believed to be the highest-power satellite navigation signal ever recorded - up to a hundred times stronger than GPS - without interfering with anything else in the sky. Xona also secured the first commercial FCC license to broadcast navigation signals, and in 2025 transmitted the first fully authenticated satellite navigation signal from space. Authentication is the quiet headline: it means a receiver can verify the signal is genuinely Pulsar and not a spoofed copy, which is the attack that worries airlines, shipping companies and militaries most.

"A navigation system is only real once it's in orbit," Manning has said. It is a line that doubles as a worldview. He is allergic to the kind of space company that is mostly a story.

The pitch for Pulsar is not romance about space. It is a list of things that break when GPS does. Autonomous vehicles that drift out of their lane. Drones that lose their place. Power grids and financial networks that quietly depend on GPS for precise time, not just location. Aviation routes near conflict zones where jamming has become routine. Manning frames the whole enterprise in terrestrial terms, which is unusual for a space founder: the satellites are interesting only because of what they let a machine on the ground do safely.

Pulsar is designed to be compatible with existing GPS receivers, which lowers the wall for adoption - a chip can listen to both. Centimeter-level accuracy, military-grade encryption, resilience to jamming and spoofing, all from a constellation the company controls. That is the bundle Manning is selling to defense, transportation, autonomy and critical-infrastructure customers.

The competitive truth is blunt: a single private company is trying to stand up an alternative to a system that entire nations operate. The $170 million round is the bet that it can be built at scale and fast enough to matter. As the company likes to put it, great ideas change the world only when they can be built at scale - and a factory in Burlingame is now stamping out the satellites to test that claim.

The investor list reads like a thesis statement. Mohari Ventures Natural Capital led the round, with Craft Ventures, ICONIQ, Woven Capital, NGP Capital, Samsung Next and Hexagon all in. Samsung and Hexagon are telling, because both sit close to the receiver and precision-measurement world that Pulsar needs to reach end users. Toyota-affiliated Woven Capital points at the automotive and autonomy market that started this whole story inside Ford's self-driving program. Manning has not tried to build a closed empire; he has been assembling the partners who put the signal into chips, cars and machines.