Xona Space Systems, a pioneer in navigation technologies from Low Earth Orbit (LEO), is excited to announce that they have raised an oversubscribed financing round to accelerate the development of their high-performance commercial satellite navigation network, bringing their total funding to over $25M.
The round was led by First Spark Ventures who is joined by numerous new investors including Lockheed Martin Ventures, SRI Ventures (of SRI International), Velvet Sea Ventures, Gaingels, Airstream Venture Partners, and Space.VC. Existing investors also continue to show firm conviction in Xona’s accomplishments and market opportunity with participation from Seraphim Space, Toyota Ventures, 1517 Fund, MaC Venture Capital, and Stellar Ventures.
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Xona is focused on the development of Pulsar – a Low Earth Orbit (LEO) satellite navigation system designed to provide resilient and trusted centimeter-level position anywhere on the globe. Within the past year Xona more than doubled their full-time headcount, launched their first orbital mission, and signed agreements with major players across the GPS/GNSS ecosystem such as Hexagon | NovAtel and Spirent Federal.
“What the team has been able to accomplish in the past year is awe inspiring,” said Xona CEO Brian Manning. “The massive domain expertise of our supporters in everything from scaling global companies to deep technical knowledge of GNSS is both a validation of our team’s capabilities as well as a catalyst that has been instrumental in our growth and speed.”
The new capital will accelerate the development of Pulsar through several critical design milestones by expanding the team and building out Xona’s new R&D and manufacturing facility in Burlingame, CA to enable more rapid design cycles and prepare for production. Xona’s first demonstration mission, Huginn, was successfully launched in May 2022, and their second mission, Muninn, is planned to launch in 2023.
“Xona’s approach to GNSS is poised to enable a whole new class of robust & reliable solutions in everything from automotive to drones,” said Manish Kothari, Managing Director of First Spark. “This is a technically challenging problem – a problem which the Xona team is uniquely qualified and experienced to address. We are very excited to be part of this journey with them.”