satellite-navigation
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Brian Manning
Brian Manning is the co-founder and CEO of Xona Space Systems, a Burlingame, California startup building Pulsar, a commercial alternative to GPS broadcast from a planned 258-satellite constellation in low-Earth orbit. A former SpaceX engineer who worked on the Falcon 9 thrust structure, Manning reunited eight Stanford aerospace graduates over pizza and beer in 2019 to chase a question nobody had answered: why has no one built a private, encrypted, centimeter-accurate navigation network? In 2022 Xona launched Huginn, the first commercial satellite navigation mission in orbit, and in March 2026 closed an oversubscribed $170 million Series C to scale manufacturing and begin deploying production satellites.
Upal Basu
Upal Basu is a General Partner and Managing Member at NGP Capital, a Nokia-backed venture capital firm in Palo Alto. A three-time wave rider of mobile transformation - first as an engineer, then as the founder and CEO of Mformation Technologies (which became the world's largest mobile device management company, managing 500M+ devices before being acquired by Alcatel-Lucent), and now as a lead investor in the 5G and connected enterprise era. With an engineering degree from Imperial College London, an MS from Stanford, and an MBA from Harvard Business School, Basu brings a rare blend of operator grit and institutional rigor to backing founders in cybersecurity, AI, autonomous robotics, satellite navigation, and industrial technology.