By Hamza Faisal

GPS is free, run by governments, and — according to a growing list of investors — no longer good enough. Xona Space Systems announced on Thursday that it has raised $250 million in Series D funding to build Pulsar, a commercial satellite navigation network designed to deliver centimeter-level precision with signals up to 100 times stronger than legacy GPS.

The round values the Burlingame, California-based company at $2.45 billion and was led by Steve Jurvetson's Future Ventures. Jurvetson, a longtime SpaceX board member, has now backed just three space companies in his career: SpaceX, Planet, and Xona. His firm put up $78.5 million of the round. New and existing investors including Craft Ventures, ICONIQ, Woven Capital, and Samsung Next also participated.

Xona, founded in 2019 by former SpaceX engineer Brian Manning, has now raised more than $570 million in total. The financing arrives just seven months after a $170 million Series C — sooner than planned, Manning said, after "seeing an immense amount of incoming demand."

100 times stronger than GPS

Pulsar is built on a simple observation: the world's navigation infrastructure still runs on GPS, a U.S. Defense Department system designed in the 1970s. It works fine on a clear day, but its faint signals are easy to jam and spoof — and impossible to pick up indoors.

Xona's satellites orbit in low Earth orbit, far below traditional GPS spacecraft, which lets them broadcast far stronger signals. The company says Pulsar delivers centimeter-level positioning, demonstrated resistance to jamming and spoofing, and the ability to reach receivers inside buildings. The planned constellation counts roughly 258 satellites, and Xona aims to produce 50 spacecraft a year by the end of 2027.

Commercial service is expected to begin in 2027, starting with a timing service for early users — precise time from space underpins financial trading, telecom networks, and power grids, not just maps.

The demand arrived before the constellation

This month already delivered two of Xona's biggest milestones. On October 20, six Pulsar satellites rode into orbit on a SpaceX rideshare mission — the company's largest launch to date. Four are modified satellites built with Aerospacelab to support initial service; two are Xona's own in-house test designs validating the hardware it will mass-produce.

In August, Xona became the first commercial navigation constellation to win FCC approval to broadcast L-band signals — the same band GPS uses — a regulatory green light no competitor holds. It also picked up about $10.7 million from the Canadian government to expand operations in Montreal.

Next year, the company plans to test Pulsar integrations with U.S. Army, Navy, and Air Force assets, as military interest in jam-proof positioning keeps growing.

Jamming is breaking the old system

The timing is not accidental. Manning told Payload that GPS jamming and spoofing in the Strait of Hormuz has disrupted navigation for more than 2,000 ships, and Russia's electronic warfare in Ukraine has forced militaries to scramble for backups. On the commercial side, demand is coming from autonomous vehicles, robotics, aviation, and critical infrastructure.

"The world's in a pretty dangerous place relying on GPS alone," Manning said. "The last several years were about proving that a commercial company could build a fundamentally better navigation system. Now we are putting that system into operation."

Risks remain. Xona has only a handful of satellites in orbit, and the full constellation is still to be built. Receiver adoption, coverage, and the sheer cost of deployment are open questions — and SpaceX itself has signaled interest in adding navigation to Starlink. But with $250 million fresh in the bank and a satellite factory that began the year as, in Manning's words, "technically an empty warehouse," Xona is now the best-funded challenger to a system the world has taken for granted for fifty years.

By Hamza Faisal