Xona Space Systems said on October 22 that it had raised $250 million at a valuation of $2.45 billion, two days after it put six satellites into orbit on SpaceX’s fifth Bandwagon rideshare, which carried 32 payloads out of Cape Canaveral. The company is building a navigation service in low Earth orbit meant to work alongside GPS, with signals it says hold up where GPS does not. Its co-founder and chief executive takes the MilSat Symposium stage at Silicon Valley Space Week in October.
Brian Manning is co-founder and chief executive of Xona Space Systems, which he started in 2019 with fellow Stanford engineers. Before that he was a responsible engineer at SpaceX, where he worked on Falcon 9 structures, and earlier he led automotive engine development at Power Solutions International. He holds bachelor’s and master’s degrees from Stanford and an MBA from London Business School. The company assembles its satellites in Burlingame, California.
The program bills the session as GPS under attack, covering jamming, spoofing and the fight over positioning, navigation and timing. Xona broadcasts from low Earth orbit rather than the medium orbit GPS uses. The company says its Pulsar signals outperformed conventional satellite navigation in jammed and indoor conditions in testing, that encrypted authentication built into the broadcast data guards against spoofing, and that Pulsar-0, the satellite Xona launched in 2025, returned accuracy under two centimeters across more than 500 transmissions. The Federal Communications Commission authorized the full commercial constellation, of more than 250 satellites, on August 3. Four of the six satellites that launched on October 20 use a bus from Aerospacelab, and Xona says the other two, built in-house in Burlingame, are test satellites. The round announced on October 22 was led by Steve Jurvetson of Future Ventures, an early investor in the company and a longtime SpaceX board member, and brings its total funding to $570 million, about seven months after a $170 million Series C. The Canadian government said on October 20 that it would put $15 million into a $64.8 million Xona project to build a mission operations and manufacturing centre in Montreal, which it expects to create about 126 jobs and which it tied to its defence industrial strategy. Xona has said it wants its assembly lines producing 50 satellites a year by the end of 2027, and that early customers in the United States, Canada and most of Europe will get about eight broadcasts a day of roughly 25 minutes each, on a revisit of about twelve hours, until the constellation grows. Patrick Shannon of TrustPoint, which has ordered forty satellites for a navigation system that does not use GPS, gives a market brief on protected PNT the day before, on the Satellite Innovation track.
Manning joins “GPS Under Attack: Jamming, Spoofing, and the PNT Fight” on Thursday, October 29, from 1:30 p.m. to 2:15 p.m. in the Hahn Auditorium at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View. Ahsun Murad of Optimal Satcom moderates, and the panel also seats Jeffrey Janicik of Innoflight, Monali Jain of AutonomousLabs.Space, Chief Master Sgt. Kevin Pfister of the Space Force’s Mission Delta 3 and Sumant Sharma of EraDrive. Optimal Satcom and AutonomousLabs.Space are sponsors of the event. The session follows lunch, and at 2:15 the room turns to a market brief on space insurance.
Silicon Valley Space Week runs Tuesday, October 27 through Thursday, October 29 at the Computer History Museum, with Satellite Innovation across the first two days and the MilSat Symposium across the last two. Manning sits on a forty-five-minute panel on the final afternoon. Xona has said it plans to start beta service early in 2027.
