Xona Space Systems Company Profile

Key Takeaways

• Xona has raised over $150M to build Pulsar, a LEO navigation constellation
• Pulsar-0, launched June 2025, delivers signals up to 100x stronger than GPS
• Production satellite launches are scheduled to begin in late 2026

Origins and the Problem Worth Solving

When Tyler Reid and Brian Manning co-founded Xona Space Systems in 2019, the satellite navigation industry had barely changed in decades. The Global Positioning System, conceived and built by the U.S. Department of Defense during the Cold War, remained the backbone of global navigation. Its satellites sit roughly 20,200 kilometers above Earth’s surface, and while the system is a marvel of engineering, it was designed for a world that didn’t yet have autonomous vehicles, precision agriculture robots, or dense urban environments filled with GPS-blocking towers.

Manning and Reid weren’t initially thinking about geopolitics or military vulnerability. Their original motivation was more practical: autonomous driving. By 2019, companies like Waymo and Uber were already operating self-driving vehicles on public roads, but their sensor suites were expensive and limited by GPS accuracy that could only resolve positions to within several meters. The two engineers figured that if you could get satellite navigation precise enough to identify which lane a car was in, you’d fundamentally change what autonomous vehicles could do. That idea, developed in California with a blank sheet of paper and a conviction that low Earth orbit could house something GPS never could, became the foundation of Xona.

The company is headquartered in Palo Alto, California, and has grown from a small founding team to approximately 106 employees as of early 2026. Its founding group includes Adrien Perkins, who serves as co-founder and Vice President of Engineering, as well as Paul Tarantino, Kazuma Gunning, Jerami M, and Bryan Chan alongside Manning and Reid. Manning holds the role of CEO while Reid serves as CTO.

What Positioning, Navigation, and Timing Actually Means

Positioning, navigation, and timing, commonly abbreviated as PNT, sounds like a technical specialty. In practice, it’s closer to oxygen: invisible, taken for granted, and catastrophic to lose. Financial markets rely on GPS timestamps to synchronize transactions. Power grids use GPS to phase-balance electricity distribution. Ships, aircraft, and autonomous vehicles obviously depend on position data, but so do mobile phone networks, emergency services, and precision agriculture systems. One 2019 analysis estimated that GPS alone generates over $500 billion in annual economic value in North America.

The trouble is that GPS signals are extraordinarily weak by the time they arrive at a receiver on the ground. The satellites are far away, and the signals they transmit have dissipated dramatically over the journey. That weakness makes them vulnerable to interference, both deliberate and accidental. Jamming, which involves broadcasting noise on the same frequencies, can render GPS useless across wide areas. Spoofing, a more sophisticated attack that sends false GPS signals to fool receivers into reporting incorrect positions, has been documented in conflict zones and has reportedly caused navigation errors in commercial shipping. In Ukraine, GPS jamming became so pervasive that U.S.-supplied precision munitions such as the High Mobility Artillery Rocket System reportedly lost effectiveness. None of that vulnerability is news to people who work in navigation, but it has become increasingly visible to governments and industries who had long assumed GPS would simply work.

Xona’s bet is that the answer lies not in patching GPS but in building a new system from the ground up, designed for the realities of 2025 and beyond.

The Pulsar Architecture

The service Xona is developing is called Pulsar, and its technical design departs from GPS in several ways that matter enormously. Where GPS satellites orbit in medium Earth orbit at around 20,200 kilometers, Pulsar satellites are designed to operate in low Earth orbit at altitudes of roughly 525 kilometers, placing them more than 20 times closer to the surface. That proximity produces a signal roughly 100 times stronger than what GPS delivers, based on assessments following the commissioning of Pulsar-0, the constellation’s first production satellite. A stronger signal is harder to jam, reaches places GPS struggles to penetrate, and enables far greater accuracy.

Pulsar satellites broadcast navigation signals in two frequency bands: L-band, which is the same frequency range GPS uses and is supported by billions of existing receivers worldwide, and C-band. The L-band compatibility is deliberate. Xona’s strategy depends on being adoptable without forcing industries to replace their existing equipment. Rather than buying new hardware, users of Pulsar signals update their device firmware. For an industry like automotive manufacturing, where chipsets and receivers are certified through lengthy regulatory processes, the ability to adopt a new navigation service through a software update rather than a hardware replacement is a major practical advantage.

The constellation’s timing architecture represents another meaningful departure from legacy designs. GPS satellites carry onboard atomic clocks that are expensive, heavy, and can drift. Xona has developed a patent-pending distributed clock architecture that maintains time synchronization across the constellation without relying on a single expensive clock per satellite. This approach reduces the cost and mass of individual satellites while maintaining the timing precision that financial systems and telecom networks require.

The full Pulsar constellation is planned at 258 satellites. Xona has structured deployment in phases. Phase 1 covers approximately 40 satellites and provides a one-satellite-in-view enhancement service over mid-latitude population centers, offering GNSS correction services that enable rapid convergence to centimeter-level positioning. Phase 2 expands the constellation to around 70 satellites, bringing those same services to global coverage. Phase 3 reaches the full 258-satellite scale, at which point Pulsar is designed to function as a standalone navigation system capable of replacing GPS rather than merely supplementing it.

How confident should anyone be in those timelines? That’s genuinely hard to say. Constellation deployments at this scale involve manufacturing complexity, launch scheduling, regulatory approvals, and integration challenges that routinely push back the plans of even well-capitalized, technically sophisticated organizations. Xona’s track record to date is encouraging, but a constellation of hundreds of satellites is a very different operational challenge than a single demonstrator.

From Huginn to Pulsar-0

The company’s technical credibility rests on two specific satellites. The first is Huginn, a technology demonstrator that launched on May 25, 2022, aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rideshare mission called Transporter-5. Huginn was built entirely in-house at Xona. The satellite operates in a sun-synchronous low Earth orbit at approximately 525 kilometers altitude with an inclination of about 97 degrees. The launch made Xona the first American private company to deploy a satellite navigation mission in orbit, and more broadly the first commercially funded satellite navigation payload to operate in low Earth orbit anywhere in the world.

Huginn was structured as a hosted payload arrangement, sharing a bus platform with other payloads and drawing on shared power systems. That design choice was practical. Low Earth orbit infrastructure at the time was optimized primarily for Earth observation constellations that required far less power than a navigation payload. Rather than wait for the hardware ecosystem to catch up, Xona accepted the payload-sharing constraint as a temporary path to proving its core technology. The gamble worked. By May 2023, Huginn had successfully transmitted precision LEO PNT signals and validated centimeter-level user positioning from orbit. The satellite also demonstrated on-orbit reprogrammability of its digital navigation waveform generator, a capability that would prove important when designing the production constellation.

The second and more significant satellite is Pulsar-0, the first production-class satellite of the Pulsar constellation. It launched in June 2025 aboard SpaceX’s Transporter-14 mission. Weighing approximately 150 kilograms, Pulsar-0 was assembled and tested by Aerospacelab, a Belgian satellite manufacturer, marking a shift away from the purely in-house production model of Huginn. On orbit, Pulsar-0 completed full bus and payload commissioning and broadcast what Xona and its investors describe as the first fully authenticated navigation signal in history transmitted from low Earth orbit. Evaluations conducted with both commercial and government partners demonstrated that the satellite could maintain operation under jamming conditions, continue functioning in GPS-denied scenarios, and receive over-the-air updates that modified its behavior after launch. Early partner testing also showed 50 to 70 percent receiver power savings and improved resistance to signal degradation caused by multipath interference in dense urban environments.

The signal strength data from Pulsar-0 attracted attention. According to assessments by Space Capital, a venture capital firm with a space technology focus, the satellite appeared to produce the highest-power satellite navigation signal ever recorded, reaching levels up to 100 times stronger than GPS while maintaining clean performance across obstructed and contested environments. Independent spectrum measurements from Septentrio, a Belgian precision navigation receiver manufacturer, confirmed the signal’s strength and quality.

Funding History and Investor Base

Xona raised its first external funding in a seed round that closed on May 14, 2020. From that starting point, the company has built a funding history that reflects both commercial venture interest and government backing. By June 2025, Xona had raised more than $150 million across eight funding rounds from a mix of 30 investors.

The most significant financing event came in June 2025, when Xona announced $92 million in new funding. That total combined a Series B equity round led by Craft Ventures with a $20 million non-dilutive Strategic Funding Increase, or STRATFI, award from SpaceWERX, the innovation arm of the United States Space Force. Sky Dayton, a partner at Craft Ventures and the founder of EarthLink, joined Xona’s board as part of the deal. Existing investors who participated in the Series B alongside Craft Ventures included Stellar Ventures, Seraphim Ventures, Toyota Ventures, First Spark, Industrious Ventures, Future Ventures, and NGP Capital.

Earlier backers include Lockheed Martin Ventures, the strategic investment arm of the defense and aerospace giant, as well as Seraphim Space Investment Trust, which is listed on the London Stock Exchange under the ticker SSIT, and MaC Venture Capital. Angel investors have included Daniel Ammann, co-founder of the precision navigation chipmaker u-blox, and Ryan Johnson, former CEO of Canoo. Trimble Ventures, the investment arm of precision positioning giant Trimble, also made a strategic investment in connection with a commercial partnership announced in early 2025.

Taylor Durand, an investor at Craft Ventures, put the company’s potential in stark terms when the Series B was announced, noting that American farmers must currently use stronger signals from Russian and Chinese satellites rather than GPS for precision agriculture, a dependency that carries both commercial and national security implications.

Defense and Government Engagement

The U.S. military’s interest in Xona is substantial and has been growing. GPS vulnerability has moved from a theoretical concern to a documented operational problem. In contested environments like Ukraine, Russian forces have deployed GPS jamming at scale, affecting everything from drone guidance to precision-guided munitions. The implications for U.S. military doctrine, which has become deeply dependent on GPS-enabled precision navigation, are significant and have accelerated official interest in commercial alternatives.

In February 2025, the U.S. Air Force Research Laboratory awarded Xona a $4.6 million contract to demonstrate Pulsar’s performance specifically in GPS-challenged and GPS-denied environments. The contract focuses on testing the system’s utility for uncrewed aircraft operations and autonomous ground vehicles, both areas where the military is investing heavily. Beyond that contract, the $20 million STRATFI award from SpaceWERX announced in June 2025 represents a meaningful non-dilutive endorsement from the Space Force, the branch with direct responsibility for U.S. space-based navigation capabilities. SpaceWERX simultaneously selected Xona as one of eight companies to receive a share of $440 million in total program funding through that initiative, announced in March 2025.

The military’s attraction to Pulsar makes practical sense. GPS signals, which travel more than 20,000 kilometers from satellite to receiver, arrive at power levels so weak that a modest jammer operating on the right frequency can overwhelm them across a wide area. Pulsar signals, arriving from a fraction of that distance, are far harder to suppress. The encrypted and authenticated signal design also addresses spoofing, which GPS’s open civilian signal cannot defend against. For applications like autonomous drone swarms or precision logistics in contested territory, the performance gap between GPS and what Pulsar promises is militarily meaningful.

Commercial Partnerships and the Ecosystem Strategy

Xona’s commercial strategy depends on embedding Pulsar into ecosystems that already have deep industry penetration rather than building its own direct-to-customer channels from scratch. The partnership with Trimble announced in March 2025 is the clearest expression of that approach. Trimble is one of the world’s largest providers of precision positioning technology, with a dominant presence in construction, agriculture, surveying, and transportation. The collaboration is structured to integrate Trimble’s GNSS correction services with Pulsar signals. The combined offering is expected to deliver centimeter-level positioning without requiring constant cellular data streaming, which is a meaningful limitation of existing correction service delivery systems, particularly in high-latitude regions, dense forests, and remote job sites.

Trimble’s Vice President of Advanced Positioning, Olivier Casabianca, described the partnership as advancing capabilities that meet the evolving needs of industries reliant on precise satellite navigation. Initial satellite launches under this collaboration are expected in late 2026, with commercial service delivery targeted for 2027.

Earlier in Xona’s history, NovAtel, a Canadian GPS equipment provider and subsidiary of Hexagon (which reported about $4.7 billion in net sales in 2021), signed a memorandum of understanding to become an early adopter of Pulsar. NovAtel manufactures GPS signal receivers used across professional surveying, agriculture, and autonomous systems applications, and its involvement validated both the technical approach and the commercial market interest that was still hypothetical when Huginn launched.

In August 2025, Astroscale UK announced an agreement to supply Xona with next-generation docking plates for integration into future Pulsar satellites. Astroscale, a company focused on in-orbit servicing and space debris removal, designed the docking plates to enable future in-orbit servicing missions. Satellites equipped with the interface can be refueled, upgraded, or safely deorbited at end of life, reducing debris risk and extending the operational flexibility of the constellation. For a company planning to operate hundreds of satellites in low Earth orbit, building in serviceability from the start is a practical decision that distinguishes Xona from most previous commercial constellation designs.

In September 2025, UK-based defense technology firm QinetiQ conducted testing of the Pulsar navigation system, focusing on GPS resilience enhancements through new satellites. That same month, Septentrio announced a collaboration with Xona to advance satellite navigation technology, reflecting growing integration of Pulsar support into high-precision professional receiver architectures.

The GPS Vulnerability That Drives Demand

GPS was not designed to be a commercial utility, and in many respects it wasn’t designed to be secure. The civilian L1 signal that most devices use is unencrypted and unauthenticated. Any device with a GPS receiver accepts whichever signal claims to be GPS, which is why spoofing works. The military’s encrypted M-code signal provides authentication, but it requires specialized receivers unavailable to most commercial users. Civilian GPS authentication initiatives exist, notably the European Galileo system’s Open Service Navigation Message Authentication (OSNMA) feature, but adoption is uneven and coverage incomplete.

The geopolitical dimension adds another layer. GPS is operated by the U.S. Space Force, and while the U.S. has committed to keeping the civilian signal freely available globally, that commitment is subject to policy decisions that could change. Countries and industries that depend on GPS without alternatives are exposed to single-point-of-failure risk at a systemic scale. Russia’s GLONASS, Europe’s Galileo, and China’s BeiDou all provide some redundancy, but they share the same fundamental architecture as GPS: large satellites in medium Earth orbit, broadcasting weak signals across vast distances. A jamming or spoofing attack effective against GPS is similarly effective against those systems.

Xona’s technical approach addresses the signal-strength vulnerability directly. Its business model also positions the company as a neutral commercial provider rather than an instrument of any government’s foreign policy, which may matter to international customers wary of depending on state-controlled systems.

The Technology at Ground Level

What does using Pulsar actually look like from a device perspective? Xona’s commercial strategy emphasizes what it calls a “software upgrade” adoption model. The company maintains a software development kit compatible with existing GNSS receivers and chipsets. A device that already receives GPS or other GNSS signals can add Pulsar reception by updating its software stack, provided the hardware includes a compatible receiver front-end. For chipset manufacturers, this means adding Pulsar signal processing to their next generation of designs, which several partners are now pursuing.

The Pulsar signal structure is designed to complement rather than conflict with existing GNSS signals. Devices can operate in a hybrid mode, using GPS or Galileo for broad coverage and Pulsar signals to resolve position ambiguities faster, improve accuracy in difficult environments, or maintain a fix when GPS is jammed. As more Pulsar satellites enter orbit and coverage improves, the system can progressively take on more of the positioning workload independently.

The applications Xona is pursuing reflect a mix of commercial and government sectors. In agriculture, centimeter-level positioning enables precision planting, irrigation, and harvesting systems to operate with far less overlap and waste than current GPS-based systems allow. In construction and surveying, it reduces dependence on ground-based reference stations that must be established at each job site. In autonomous vehicles and robotics, it provides the lane-level accuracy that GPS was never designed to deliver. Financial system timing, maritime navigation, and aviation all represent additional addressable markets. The company’s own website lists defense, agriculture, telecom, transportation and logistics, infrastructure and energy, maritime, construction and surveying, aviation, financial systems, fleet tracking, mining and exploration, and autonomous robotics as target verticals.

Competition and the Broader PNT Market

Xona is not the only company working on GPS augmentation or alternatives, though the specific niche of a dedicated commercial LEO navigation constellation is a small one. NextNav, a publicly traded company, provides terrestrial positioning services using ground-based beacons rather than satellites, targeting indoor and urban environments where GPS struggles. Satelles provides PNT services using the Iridium satellite constellation, leveraging Iridium’s signal strength advantages in LEO to deliver a service that has found particularly strong traction in defense and critical infrastructure markets. Swift Navigation, acquired by Aptiv in 2022, developed centimeter-level GNSS correction services for automotive applications.

The broader market for GNSS-based services is very large. GPS alone is estimated to enable over $500 billion in annual economic value in North America, and the global market for satellite navigation equipment, services, and downstream applications runs into the hundreds of billions of dollars annually. The market for GPS security and resilience solutions specifically has grown sharply as awareness of jamming and spoofing vulnerabilities has increased.

Where Xona sits in competitive terms is in a category that didn’t exist before it created it: a dedicated commercial LEO PNT constellation designed from the start as a production-grade, independently operated navigation system. That novelty is both its competitive advantage and its risk. There’s no precedent for how fast the market will develop, how receptive regulators in various jurisdictions will be to spectrum allocations for a commercial navigation constellation, or whether competing technologies might solve the same problems at lower cost.

The 2026 Operational Pivot

Xona’s June 2025 announcement that it would begin launching production-operational satellites in 2026 marked a shift in how the company describes itself. Before the Series B and the Pulsar-0 launch, the public narrative centered on demonstration and development. Since then, the language has shifted toward delivery, customers, and scale.

The plan for 2026 involves bringing the first batch of production-operational satellites online and enabling initial service for the earliest commercial and government customers. Manufacturing capacity is being expanded to support the eventual 258-satellite constellation, and the company is hiring across mission operations, ground systems, signal processing, customer success, and go-to-market functions. As of early 2026, the company’s headcount stands at approximately 106 employees, a figure that will need to grow substantially to support full constellation operations.

The Trimble collaboration’s timeline aligns with this trajectory: initial satellite launches in late 2026, commercial service delivery beginning in 2027. That schedule gives Xona roughly 18 months from the initial production launch to bring a commercial service online that can support paying customers with contractual service level expectations, a very different operational standard than the demonstration and partner evaluation work that has characterized the Pulsar-0 era.

The regulatory dimension also bears watching. Operating a commercial satellite navigation constellation requires frequency allocations from national and international telecommunications authorities, along with orbital slot coordination through the International Telecommunication Union. Xona operates in L-band and C-band, both of which are regulated frequencies with competing users. The pace and outcome of those regulatory processes will shape how quickly the constellation can scale globally and whether operations in certain geographies face constraints.

Leadership and Organizational Culture

Brian Manning, who co-founded the company with Tyler Reid, has led Xona as CEO since its founding. Manning has consistently positioned the company around a single central argument: that the world has built a significant dependence on positioning and timing infrastructure that most people never think about until it fails, and that the system it depends on was not built to survive the threats it now faces. That message has proven effective at attracting both venture capital and government contracts in an environment where GPS vulnerability has moved from specialist concern to mainstream policy discussion.

Adrien Perkins, co-founder and Vice President of Engineering, has been the public face of the technical side of the company. Perkins described the Pulsar-0 launch as marking “the next step towards that future,” referring to the infrastructure the company wants to build. The executive team appears to have maintained technical depth while building out the business functions needed for a commercial service company, a transition that many hardware startups struggle to execute.

Sky Dayton’s addition to the board following the Series B brings a specific kind of institutional knowledge. Dayton founded EarthLink in 1994 and was a co-founder of Boingo Wireless, giving him direct experience building connectivity infrastructure companies from early stage to maturity. That background may prove relevant as Xona moves from satellite development into the operational and customer relationship challenges of running a real-time positioning service for industries with low tolerance for downtime.

A Company at an Inflection Point

Xona entered 2026 with one production satellite in orbit, more than $150 million in committed capital, a Defense Department contract, a collaboration with one of the world’s largest precision positioning companies, and a plan to begin delivering commercial service within approximately twelve months. For a company that didn’t exist until 2019, that’s a trajectory that even skeptical observers of the commercial space industry would have to acknowledge as real. Whether it constitutes proof that a private company can build and operate an independent global navigation constellation remains an open question, one that will only be answered as more satellites launch and customers begin depending on the service for actual operations.

The technical case for Pulsar is well-supported at this point. Huginn proved the LEO navigation concept. Pulsar-0 demonstrated production-grade hardware performance, signal strength, and software-defined flexibility. The partnerships with organizations like Trimble, NovAtel, Septentrio, and QinetiQ validate that serious industry players have reviewed the technology and concluded it merits integration. The defense contracts indicate government confidence in both the technology and the company’s operational seriousness.

The business case is still being written. Building a constellation of 258 satellites and operating it as a real-time commercial service will require sustained capital, manufacturing scale, regulatory success across multiple jurisdictions, and customer adoption at rates that may or may not materialize on schedule. The global PNT market is enormous, and the need for GPS resilience is real, but markets do not always adopt better technology as quickly as the technology’s developers expect.

What’s clear is that the commercial satellite navigation industry looks different in early 2026 than it did when Tyler Reid and Brian Manning started sketching out the idea in 2019. Xona made it different, one satellite at a time.

Summary

Xona Space Systems is a Palo Alto-based navigation technology company founded in 2019 with the goal of building the first commercial satellite navigation constellation in low Earth orbit. Its Pulsar service is designed to deliver signals up to 100 times stronger than GPS, with centimeter-level positioning accuracy and built-in resistance to jamming and spoofing. The company launched its first demonstration satellite, Huginn, in May 2022 on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rideshare mission, establishing itself as the first private company to operate a satellite navigation mission in orbit. Its first production-class satellite, Pulsar-0, launched in June 2025, completing full commissioning and broadcasting the first authenticated navigation signal from LEO in history. Xona has raised more than $150 million in total funding, including a Series B led by Craft Ventures and a $20 million STRATFI award from SpaceWERX. Commercial partnerships with Trimble, NovAtel, Septentrio, QinetiQ, and Astroscale have extended the company’s reach across precision agriculture, construction, defense, and in-orbit servicing sectors. Production satellite launches targeting initial commercial service are expected in late 2026, with full commercial delivery planned for 2027 in partnership with Trimble and other early adopters. The planned full constellation of 258 satellites is designed to provide global coverage sufficient to support standalone positioning independent of GPS, with the bulk of deployment targeted for completion by approximately 2030.

Appendix: Top 10 Questions Answered in This Article

When was Xona Space Systems founded?

Xona Space Systems was founded in 2019 in Palo Alto, California. The company was established by co-founders including CEO Brian Manning, CTO Tyler Reid, and Adrien Perkins, who serves as Vice President of Engineering, among others.

What is Pulsar and how does it differ from GPS?

Pulsar is Xona’s commercial positioning, navigation, and timing service, delivered via a planned constellation of 258 satellites in low Earth orbit at approximately 525 kilometers altitude. Unlike GPS satellites orbiting more than 20,000 kilometers above Earth, Pulsar’s closer proximity enables signals up to 100 times stronger, centimeter-level accuracy, and much greater resistance to jamming and spoofing.

What was the Huginn satellite and why did it matter?

Huginn was Xona’s first technology demonstration satellite, launched on May 25, 2022, aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rideshare mission called Transporter-5. It became the first commercially funded satellite navigation mission to operate in low Earth orbit, proving that high-performance PNT services could be delivered from a small, privately built satellite.

What is Pulsar-0 and what has it accomplished?

Pulsar-0 is Xona’s first production-class navigation satellite, launched in June 2025 aboard SpaceX’s Transporter-14 mission. It completed full commissioning in orbit and broadcast the first fully authenticated navigation signal ever transmitted from low Earth orbit, demonstrating signal strength up to 100 times greater than GPS and software-defined upgradability from the ground.

How much funding has Xona Space Systems raised?

Xona has raised more than $150 million in total funding across eight rounds as of June 2025. The largest financing event was a $92 million announcement in June 2025, which included a Series B round led by Craft Ventures and a $20 million non-dilutive STRATFI award from SpaceWERX, the U.S. Space Force’s innovation arm.

Who are Xona’s key investors?

Xona’s investor base includes Craft Ventures, Seraphim Ventures, Toyota Ventures, NGP Capital, Stellar Ventures, Industrious Ventures, Future Ventures, First Spark, Lockheed Martin Ventures, and Trimble Ventures. Sky Dayton of Craft Ventures joined the board as part of the Series B, and angel investors include Daniel Ammann, co-founder of u-blox.

What U.S. government contracts has Xona received?

In February 2025, the U.S. Air Force Research Laboratory awarded Xona a $4.6 million contract to demonstrate Pulsar’s capabilities in GPS-challenged and GPS-denied environments, specifically targeting uncrewed aircraft and autonomous vehicles. Xona also received a $20 million STRATFI award from SpaceWERX as part of a broader $440 million initiative selecting eight companies in March 2025.

What is Xona’s collaboration with Trimble?

Announced in March 2025, the Xona and Trimble collaboration pursues the integration of Trimble’s GNSS correction services with Xona’s Pulsar signal network. Trimble Ventures made a strategic investment in Xona as part of the deal, and the combined service is expected to begin delivery in 2027, with initial satellite launches planned for late 2026.

What are the phases of the Pulsar constellation deployment?

Pulsar’s deployment is structured in three phases. Phase 1 covers approximately 40 satellites providing GNSS enhancement over mid-latitude population centers with centimeter-level positioning. Phase 2 expands to around 70 satellites for global coverage. Phase 3 reaches the full 258-satellite scale, enabling standalone positioning independent of GPS.

How does Pulsar work with existing GPS devices?

Pulsar signals are designed to be compatible with existing GNSS receiver hardware through a software or firmware update rather than requiring new equipment. Xona provides a software development kit for developers and chipset manufacturers, and the service is designed to operate alongside GPS, Galileo, and other global navigation systems in a hybrid mode while also being capable of standalone operation at full constellation scale.