SpaceTech News Roundup – W/C 19.10.26

What Comes After GPS: Our $250M Series D

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.

Government of Canada invests $15 million in Xona Space Systems Canada

Project will advance Canada's next-generation satellite navigation capabilities and deliver on dual-use objectives under Canada's Defence Industrial Strategy

ICEYE and Nokia partner with The Ministry of Defence of Ukraine to develop sovereign satcom capability

ICEYE and Nokia signed a Letter of Intent with The Ministry of Defence of Ukraine, to explore cooperation in space. The partnership aims to support Ukraine’s defense capabilities, particularly in building sovereign satellite communications. The shared intent was announced on 22 October 2026 during the visit of the Prime Minister of Finland to Ukraine. Earlier this month, ICEYE and Nokia announced a partnership to develop secure, sovereign and high-performance broadband low Earth orbit (LEO) satellite communications systems for governments, supporting missions from defense and border security to emergency services and disaster response. Built on trusted European technology, the jointly developed satellite communications systems will give nations ownership and control of the satellites, ground segment and terminals.

ICEYE partners with OroraTech to deliver full-lifecycle wildfire intelligence

ICEYE announced a new partnership with OroraTech that expands ICEYE’s wildfire intelligence capabilities across the full lifecycle of an event. By integrating OroraTech’s thermal satellite data with ICEYE’s synthetic aperture radar (SAR) observations, the new capability enables governments, insurers, utilities and other organizations to detect wildfires earlier, monitor how they progress, assess impacts to structures and infrastructure, and understand the full extent of damage through recovery.

SkyFi Integrates SatVu to Deliver High-Resolution Thermal Satellite Imagery

SkyFi customers can now access SatVu's archive and task new thermal captures from its HotSat constellation of satellites directly in the SkyFi platform. SatVu's satellites capture mid-wave infrared (MWIR) imagery at 3.5-meter resolution, day or night, with an accuracy of 2 Kelvin and a precision of 0.2 Kelvin. Thermal imagery measures heat emissivity. At 3.5m resolution, HotSat data resolves activity at the asset and subcomponent level - which no other commercial thermal sensor currently operational can do. HotSat imagery indicates whether an individual turbine is running, a generator is active, a gas flare is burning, or a power plant is discharging cooling water. That gives analysts a direct read on activity at a site at the time of collection.

AST SpaceMobile Advances Space-Based Cellular Broadband in Europe in Collaboration with European Mobile Network Operator Partners

AST SpaceMobile welcomes the Letter of Intent signed by its mobile network operator partners Deutsche Telekom, Orange, Telefónica and Vodafone to explore a potential joint bid for Mobile Satellite Services (MSS) spectrum as AST SpaceMobile continues to advance service readiness across Europe. The collaboration among Europe’s four largest mobile network operators is expected to accelerate network integration, improve the customer experience and extend coverage into areas without reliable mobile connectivity. The initiative supports a coordinated approach to spectrum access and service deployment, strengthening European digital data sovereignty while enabling operators to deliver space-based cellular broadband through their existing mobile services.

Introducing Nova: the first world model for extreme physics

Zenithon has introduced Nova, the first world model for extreme physics. Nova is pretrained on a heterogeneous collection of physical systems spanning plasma physics, fluid dynamics and more, across different simulation codes, spatial resolutions, time horizons, scales and dimensions. Given an initial state, the inputs and actions that drive a system and its design parameters, Nova predicts how it evolves. It can adapt to operating regimes outside its pretraining data with a handful of simulations, and in some cases without any new simulations at all.

Bandwagon-5 Mission

On Tuesday, October 20 at 7:04 a.m. ET, Falcon 9 launched the Bandwagon-5 mission to orbit from Space Launch Complex 40 (SLC-40) at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida. On board this mission were 32 payloads including cubesats, microsats, and reentry vehicles. Several companies from the Seraphim portfolio were onboard: ICEYE, Xona, HawkEye 360, and Tomorrow.io.