Xona Space
Signal shows up before narrative. In the space economy, that signal is tightening around Xona Space Systems, a Burlingame-based company founded in 2019 by Brian Manning, Tyler Reid, and Bryan Chan, a trio shaped by Stanford’s GPS Lab, autonomous systems, and the hard physics of space. They looked at GPS, a system built for a different era, and asked a sharper question. What happens when machines, not humans, become the primary users of navigation?
That question turned into PULSAR, Xona’s answer to a world that cannot afford to guess where it is. Instead of relying on satellites far out in medium Earth orbit, Xona is building a low Earth orbit constellation designed to deliver stronger signals, faster acquisition, and resilience where GPS struggles. Urban canyons, contested environments, dense infrastructure. The places where autonomy either works flawlessly or fails loudly. PULSAR is built to tilt that outcome toward precision, with a patent-pending architecture that pushes accuracy forward while hardening against interference that legacy systems were never designed to handle.
The company has already put hardware in orbit. Its Huginn satellite launched in May 2022 on SpaceX Transporter-5, marking one of the first privately funded navigation demonstrations of its kind. That is not theory. That is signal in the sky. Behind it sits more than $150M in funding, including a Series B led by Craft Ventures and a $20M STRATFI award from SpaceWERX, alongside backing from Space Capital, NGP Capital, Seraphim Capital, and others who understand that positioning, navigation, and timing is not a feature. It is infrastructure.
Then comes the alignment play. Xona’s collaboration with Trimble is not a headline for decoration. It is distribution meeting precision, correction services meeting a new orbital layer. When incumbents lean in, it usually means the ground is already shifting.
Inside the company, the tempo reflects the mission. Engineers close to the signal, operators close to the hardware, decisions made by the people who have to live with them. This is a team hiring across spacecraft, RF, software, and operations, looking for builders who do not flinch at complexity and do not wait for permission to solve it.
Xona is not trying to replace GPS. That would be a smaller ambition. They are building a second layer of truth for a world that is becoming increasingly autonomous and increasingly unforgiving when systems drift. If you are building in autonomy, robotics, or infrastructure, this is a company worth watching closely. If you want to help define how machines understand where they are, they are hiring.
