The Urgent Need to Move Beyond GPS and Transform Positioning, Navigation and Timing.
Today we’re thrilled to announce Craft’s investment in Xona Space Systems’ Series B, which brings their total funding to $150M. Xona is the company behind the country’s first low Earth orbit satellite network designed to deliver encrypted, centimeter‑level positioning and navigation, and nanosecond-level timing (PNT) to billions of devices.
GPS is ingrained in daily life, from rideshare pickups, the blue dot on your Google Maps, to aviation, shipping and global finance — yet the current system is decades old and surprisingly brittle.
Today’s GPS satellites orbit 20,000 kilometers above Earth. Why is this a problem?
- GPS broadcast signals are so weak they mostly don’t work indoors
- GPS signals can be easily jammed, as we’ve seen in the Ukraine and other contested environments including this week’s tanker collisions in the Middle East
- GPS is unencrypted and easy to spoof, making it possible for everything from drones to airplanes to think they’re somewhere they’re not
- GPS is only accurate to the level of meters, a massive limitation.
These limitations are such that American farmers today must resort to stronger signals from Russian and Chinese satellites to guide their equipment. Airplanes and cars use third-party correction services that add cost and complexity. As autonomous cars, drones, aircraft, critical infrastructure, and national‑security needs grow, relying on navigation technology designed nearly 50 years ago is an unacceptable risk for our country.
Xona’s Pulsar constellation will solve this problem. Pulsar satellites fly 20 times closer to Earth than GPS and transmit signals 150 times stronger, achieving centimeter-scale accuracy indoors, even in dense cities and contested environments. Best of all, Pulsar’s signal will work with the billions of existing GPS chips through a simple firmware update — no new hardware required. Think about “Find My iPhone” telling you not only that your phone is in your house, but in the sofa by the TV. The applications are limitless.
Xona’s founders met during grad school at Stanford, then went on to SpaceX, Blue Origin, and Maxar before regrouping in 2019. CEO Brian Manning helped design the Falcon 9 thrust structure, and CTO Dr. Tyler Reid has authored much of the research that underpins low‑orbit navigation today. Their deep domain expertise and execution speed makes them uniquely suited to tackle this challenge, and their early progress has only reinforced that conviction.
The first Xona commercial satellite, Pulsar-0, launched this week on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket.
Craft has supported founders building the foundational infrastructure of space. In addition to SpaceX, which is our largest single investment as a firm, our partnership with the incredible founders at Swarm showed us that startup innovation in low Earth orbit can have a huge impact. Xona continues that tradition, bringing precision navigation to the next generation of autonomous systems and billions of daily interactions with technology.
Great companies are built by exceptional teams solving urgent problems. We’re excited to back such an incredible team and partner with Xona as they build their constellation and deliver a safer, more precise, and more resilient navigation layer for the planet.
Why We Invested in Xona Space Systems was originally published in Craft Ventures on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.