🛰🛰🛰 A great group of investors just invested $250M in next-gen GPS from Xona. On Tuesday, SpaceX launched 6 Xona sats, all operational. You can see one deployed in space in the last image, adorned with team signatures. Xona holds the first and only FCC license to operate a commercial GPS service. By flying a constellation closer to Earth, the service is 100x more powerful, so it even works indoors. And more precise, to cm resolution. And more secure and robust to spoofing. And it’s backward compatible with existing GPS systems. Commercial service begins in 2027. Excerpts from Forbes today: “CEO Brian Manning, a former SpaceX engineer who cofounded Xona in 2019 with seven fellow alums of Stanford’s aeronautics and astronautics department decided to raise again after “seeing an immense amount of incoming demand, which I think is a reflection of the progress we have made. We started the year with technically an empty warehouse, and now we have a functional satellite factory.” Jurvetson was an early investor and former board member in Tesla and has a stake in Elon Musk’s Boring Company. Xona is his third space investment, with satellites apparently becoming something of a specialty. Satellites have three major markets, each of which involves a distinct set of hardware and a tailored altitude. Jurvetson’s portfolio neatly spans the trifecta: SpaceX’s Starlink offers communication services; geospatial imaging company Planet photographs Earth; and Xona is working to disrupt the third industry segment, navigation, which has historically been dominated by government-run services like GPS. The U.S. Defense Department developed GPS in the 1970s. The system identifies locations using a constellation of satellites that revolve at a mid-altitude orbit; it also has the benefit of being free. But the flaws of GPS are becoming impossible to ignore. Because its signals are fairly weak, new technologies are increasingly able to jam them with competing transmissions or even “spoof” them with imitation radio waves. This is a particular problem on the modern battlefield—Russia’s electronic warfare tactics are forcing Ukrainians to supplement GPS with backup navigation systems—but it’s disrupting civilian life as well, including commercial travel, which still overwhelmingly uses GPS. “The world’s in a pretty dangerous place relying on GPS alone,” says Manning. Xona is working to create a stronger and more reliable alternative. Following the business model that Starlink popularized, it plans to mass-produce low-orbit satellites, link them into a commercial network and then sell its services. It expects to deploy 258 satellites into an initial constellation it’s calling Pulsar, which will orbit at a lower altitude than GPS and therefore transmit more powerful signals. Pulsar’s wide-bandwidth radio waves and cutting-edge software will also make it particularly accurate; it will offer centimeter-level precision, which GPS can typically only achieve after applying correction data. “Fortune favors the bold,” says Jurvetson, who returned to Forbes’ Midas list of top venture investors. “We’ve seen entirely new commercial markets emerge in space, from rideshare launches to daily observation of the entire Earth, that few could have imagined before SpaceX and Planet did it. Xona has the same level of ambition: bring commercial innovation to a domain historically reserved for nation-states.” This $250 million venture round—which brings the company’s total funding to over $570 million—comes just days after Xona hit a key milestone. On Tuesday, it officially kicked off the rollout of its commercial network by launching six satellites into orbit on one of SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rockets.” Company: XonaSpace.com

6 Xona Pulsar sats are locked and loaded for the SpaceX Bandwagon launch Monday morning. Their next-gen GPS antenna is visible (the white rings on center left), very different from their first flown design, from the post below.