Xona Space Systems opened a satellite manufacturing facility in Burlingame, California on April 9, moving its Pulsar positioning, navigation, and timing service from orbital demonstration to production-scale deployment.
Pulsar operates from low Earth orbit as a commercial alternative to GPS, designed to address the jamming, spoofing, and signal-strength vulnerabilities that have increasingly exposed legacy navigation infrastructure’s limitations in both military and civilian contexts.
The facility produces satellites whose signals are up to 100 times stronger than traditional GPS and accurate to two centimeters, operating in low Earth orbit 20 times closer to Earth than existing GPS infrastructure. Pulsar is designed to work with existing GPS devices — a design choice enabled by Xona’s decision to move from C-band to L-band frequencies after determining that most users lack compatible C-band equipment. “Compatibility with existing user equipment was critical to scaling,” said Brian Manning, Xona’s co-founder and CEO.
The factory opening follows a $170 million Series C closed in late March, led by Mohari Ventures Natural Capital with participation from Craft Ventures, ICONIQ, Woven Capital, NGP Capital, Samsung Next, Hexagon, and other investors. “This factory is how we move from proof-of-concept to active global infrastructure,” Manning said. “We’ve already demonstrated how the technology works, now it’s about manufacturing and deploying our constellation faster than anyone thought possible.”
At full production, the company aims to manufacture more navigation satellites per week than the U.S. currently produces in a year, with a target of deploying the full 258-satellite constellation for the cost of a single GPS satellite on orbit today.
The defense dimension was central to the opening remarks. “Anything that moves, anything that needs to know where it is, is a potential customer of ours — including the Department of Defense,” Manning said. “We’re not built as a defense contractor necessarily, but we are proud of the work that we do with the U.S. government and other governments.” The Space Force has already awarded Xona a Strategic Funding Increase (STRATFI) agreement combining $20 million in government funding with $30 million in private capital, as military interest in alternative PNT capabilities grows amid increasing reliance on GPS in contested environments.
Manning also described Xona’s singular position in the regulatory landscape. The company is the first commercial operator approved by the FCC to broadcast on the GPS frequency spectrum alongside sovereign navigation systems. “We were sitting in rooms with China, Russia, Europe and Xona,” Manning told the San Francisco Business Journal. “It was an area that no commercial company has ever gone into.”
The broader commercial picture is one of infrastructure inadequacy meeting an autonomous-systems moment. “This new era of technology is largely here — cars driving themselves, robots, mobile devices, physical AI, wearables, autonomous farm tractors,” Manning said at the opening. “All of these things share one fundamental thing in common: to operate safely, to operate safely at scale, they simply need to know where they are.” “It’s ignoring the underlying challenge that the infrastructure was not built to do what everyone is trying to use it to do today,” he added. “That’s what we’re building — an entirely new infrastructure.”
Rep. Kevin Mullin (D-CA) spoke at the ceremony, framing the facility in terms of national competitiveness. “The question to the United States is simple — will we lead this era of navigation, or will we follow?” Mullin said. “We’ve seen navigation disrupted in critical shipping lanes, driving gas prices up for everyone.”
Over a dozen commercial receiver partners are already tracking signals from Xona’s first production-class satellite, launched in June 2025. Six additional satellites are planned for a SpaceX rideshare mission in Q4, with broader deployment expected in 2027. Trimble — an investor and customer whose VP spoke at the ceremony — announced a collaboration with Xona in 2025 to integrate its correction services with Pulsar, targeting centimeter-precision positioning across construction, agriculture, and geospatial markets.
