A Burlingame company is putting hundreds of satellites in low orbit to give the planet positioning you can trust - and that nobody can quietly fake.
XONA SPACE SYSTEMS // The logo sits over a star field, which is either a design choice or a very honest description of where the product lives.
Walk into Xona Space Systems on a weekday and you will see spacecraft being assembled the way other companies assemble appliances. That is the point. Xona is not building one exquisite satellite and holding its breath. It is building a production line, because the plan calls for roughly 258 of them, and the company says it wants to make navigation satellites faster per week than the United States typically builds in a year.
The product is called Pulsar: a low-Earth-orbit constellation that beams positioning, navigation, and timing - the unglamorous trio known as PNT - down to Earth with centimeter-level precision. It is the kind of infrastructure you only notice when it breaks. Xona is betting that, increasingly, it breaks.
"GPS has been foundational to modern life, but it was designed for a different era."
The signal that guides your car, syncs the power grid, timestamps stock trades, and lands aircraft travels from medium Earth orbit. By the time it reaches the ground it is faint - famously compared to seeing a car headlight from thousands of miles away. Faint signals are easy to drown out with a cheap jammer, and easy to imitate with a spoofer that politely tells your receiver it is somewhere it is not.
For most of GPS history this was a tolerable inconvenience. Then jamming and spoofing went from spy-novel plot device to a daily reality over contested airspace and shipping lanes. Suddenly the most invisible utility on Earth had a visible weakness, and a free service run by a government turned out to be exactly as upgradeable as a free service run by a government.
"A signal you cannot verify is just a rumor with good aim."
Xona was founded in 2019 by Brian Manning, Tyler Reid, and Adrien Perkins. The pedigree is almost suspiciously on-the-nose: the team came out of Stanford's Space Systems Development Lab, where their GPS experiments collected navigation-institute awards, and Manning had been a responsible engineer on Falcon 9 thrust structures at SpaceX - the kind of hardware that has to work the first time, with people on top of it.
Their bet had three parts. Fly the satellites in low Earth orbit, where proximity makes the signal up to 100 times stronger and far harder to jam. Add cryptographic authentication, so a receiver can tell a real Pulsar signal from a convincing fake. And make it work with the chips already in the world's devices - in many cases through a software update rather than a hardware swap. Not a replacement for GPS so much as a tougher, more honest layer on top of it.
Low Earth orbit puts the satellites roughly 20x nearer than GPS, which is why the signal lands with real punch instead of a whisper.
Authentication is built in, so spoofed signals get caught rather than trusted. Pulsar-0 broadcast the first fully authenticated nav signal from orbit.
Designed to work with existing GPS hardware, often via software, so the upgrade path does not require replacing the world's receivers.
Stanford and SpaceX alumni set out to build a commercial PNT constellation beyond legacy GPS.
An early technology demonstrator reaches orbit on a SpaceX rideshare, proving the concept off the ground.
Led by Craft Ventures, the round funds the jump from prototypes toward production-class hardware.
The first production-class satellite reaches orbit and broadcasts the first fully authenticated navigation signal in history, demonstrating ~42mm accuracy.
An oversubscribed round, led by Mohari Ventures Natural Capital, funds scaled production in Burlingame with first US-made satellites due later in the year.
Marketing loves the phrase "next generation." Here it earns its keep in a few specific, measurable ways. The two that matter most are accuracy and signal strength - and on both, Pulsar is not claiming a polite improvement.
Roughly the difference between "your block" and "your shoelace." Pulsar-0 demonstrated about 42mm on orbit; consumer GPS lands in the meters.
A stronger signal is harder to jam and reaches places GPS quits: urban canyons, under trees, and contested airspace where someone is actively trying to ruin your day.
"Centimeter-level certainty to any device, anywhere on Earth."
Skeptics are right to ask whether a slick deck has met reality. So far the receipts are real. Xona has raised more than $390M to date, capped by an oversubscribed $170M Series C in March 2026 led by Mohari Ventures Natural Capital, with Craft Ventures, ICONIQ, Woven Capital, NGP Capital, Samsung Next, and Hexagon along for the ride. That investor list is a who's who of people who care a lot about devices, vehicles, and precise measurement.
On the customer side, the U.S. Air Force Research Laboratory put up a $4.65M contract to demonstrate Pulsar's capabilities - a useful signal that the people most worried about jamming are interested in an alternative. And Pulsar-0 did the thing that decks cannot: it actually flew, and it actually broadcast an authenticated signal from orbit.
"This funding allows us to move faster. To build at scale. And to deploy a system designed for the world that's already emerging."
Xona sells to the industries that quietly run on PNT and cannot afford for it to wobble: defense, agriculture, telecom, transportation and logistics, maritime, aviation, and the long-promised fleets of autonomous machines. A self-driving truck that thinks it is one lane over is not a rounding error. A power grid whose timing drifts is not a minor outage. Precision and trust are the product; the satellites are just how it gets delivered.
The business model is refreshingly old-fashioned underneath the rockets: sell a reliable service to organizations who will pay for reliability, and make adoption cheap by riding the receivers already in the field. The competition is partly other startups, but mostly the incumbents - GPS, Galileo, GLONASS, BeiDou - free, ubiquitous, and exactly as modern as the decade that built them.
"Positioning the World for Progress."
Return to Burlingame. The satellites coming off that line are not museum pieces; the first US-made ones are slated to launch later in 2026, and each one is a small argument that navigation should be a thing you can verify rather than a thing you simply hope is true. If Xona is right, the next decade of cars, drones, ships, and grids will lean on a signal that is stronger, sharper, and signed.
The honest caveat: 258 satellites is a lot of satellites, and a constellation is only as good as the part of it that is actually in orbit. Xona has flown the proof and raised the money. Now it has to build the rest - one stamped-out satellite at a time. The thing you never think about is getting a quiet, careful rebuild, and the people doing it would very much like you to keep not thinking about it.