Xona Space Systems, a California company building a satellite navigation network in low Earth orbit, has raised $250m in a Series D round at a $2.45bn valuation. The company announced the round on 22 October 2026.
Future Ventures, the firm co-founded by Steve Jurvetson, led the round. Jurvetson is a longtime SpaceX board member and was an early investor in Xona. The company said new and existing investors also took part but did not name them, and SatNews did not name any either. SatNews described the valuation as post-money.
Xona said the round takes its total funding to more than $570m.
“Navigation capabilities can no longer afford to evolve on the timescales of traditional government satellite programs.”Brian Manning, Co-Founder and CEO, Xona
What Xona does
Xona was founded in 2019 and is run by co-founder and chief executive Brian Manning. It is building Pulsar, a constellation of satellites that broadcast positioning, navigation and timing signals from low Earth orbit, as an alternative and complement to GPS.
The company said Pulsar works with existing commercial receivers that can be upgraded without hardware changes and delivers positioning accurate to better than two centimetres. SatNews reported that Xona says its signals are up to 100 times stronger than conventional GPS, which helps them reach inside buildings and dense urban areas, and that the broadcasts carry encrypted authentication to resist spoofing.
Xona launched a demonstration satellite, Pulsar-0, in 2025 and said it has carried out more than 500 transmissions since. On 20 October 2026 it launched its first block of six production-class Pulsar satellites on SpaceX's Bandwagon-5 rideshare mission from Cape Canaveral, SatNews reported. Xona said four of the six will start serving customers in 2027, and the other two are the first satellites it designed and built entirely in-house. SatNews reported that the Federal Communications Commission authorised full commercial deployment of Pulsar in August 2026.
What the money is for
Xona said it will use the funding to expand manufacturing, launch more satellites and build the systems needed to run Pulsar as a global service. The company builds its spacecraft at a factory in Burlingame, California, and said it wants to reach a pace of several satellites a week.
SatNews reported that the company is moving from prototyping to serial production in Burlingame and aims for capacity of 50 satellites a year by the end of 2027, the year it plans to begin commercial navigation services. Neither source named any customers.
In the announcement, Manning argued that navigation technology needs to move faster than traditional government satellite programs allow.
The funding so far
The Series D followed a $170m Series C about seven months earlier, according to SatNews. Payload reported in March 2026 that the Series C was led by Mohari Ventures and Natural Capital, with Craft Ventures, ICONIQ, Woven Capital, NGP Capital, Samsung Next and Hexagon also investing. Payload said that round followed a $92m Series B in June of the previous year.
Xona has not disclosed its headcount.
Company website: xonaspace.com