TL;DR / Executive Summary
- Xona has raised $250 million in Series D funding as it builds its commercial satellite navigation network, Pulsar.
- Seraphim participated in the funding round which valued the company at $2.45 billion.
- Pulsar is designed to complement GPS with centimetre-level positioning, signals up to 100 times stronger and protection against spoofing.
- Xona launched six Pulsar satellites on 20 October, moving towards early commercial service in 2027.
Extract from Xona’s blog announcing the funding round below.
For decades, GPS has been one of the most important pieces of infrastructure in the world. It has given billions of people and devices a common understanding of where they are and what time it is, enabling everything from global commerce and transportation to communications networks and power grids to operate in synchronized harmony. But the world we’re building today looks very different from the one GPS was designed to support. Machines are becoming more autonomous, critical infrastructure is increasingly dependent on precise, trusted timing, and the limitations of today’s navigation systems are becoming harder to work around.
We started Xona in 2019 because we believed the answer wasn’t to simply recreate GPS with newer satellites, but to build something fundamentally better. Today, we’re announcing $250 million in Series D funding at a $2.45 billion valuation, bringing the total capital we’ve raised to more than $570 million. The round is led by Steve Jurvetson’s Future Ventures, with participation from new and existing investors. A longtime SpaceX board member, Jurvetson is an early backer of Xona and has previously backed SpaceX and Planet as they helped transform commercial launch and Earth observation.
This funding comes at an important inflection point for Xona. We’ve spent the last several years proving that a commercial company can build a fundamentally better satellite navigation system. Now we’re moving from proving the technology to putting it into operation, with the capital, team and infrastructure to begin delivering service and rapidly scale toward global coverage.
