Co-led by Future Ventures. 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.
On Tuesday, SpaceX launched 6 Xona sats, all operational. You can see one deployed in space in the last image below, adorned with team signatures.
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.
“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.”
Company: www.XonaSpace.com
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