A private rival to GPS nears orbit

For decades, satellite navigation has been one of the clearest examples of a government-built utility: free at the point of use, funded by taxpayers, and effectively unchallenged by private industry. That arrangement is about to get its first serious commercial test. Xona Space Systems, a startup founded in 2019, is preparing to send six satellites into orbit this month, the opening move in a plan to sell navigation and timing signals as a paid service.

The stakes are not abstract. GPS and its international counterparts were designed for a world that predates farming robots and self-driving cars, and their signals have proven vulnerable to interference. Xona's bet is that a stronger, more precise signal can support applications the existing networks cannot reliably serve.

Engineers who met over pizza

Xona grew out of Stanford University's aerospace engineering graduate program, where five engineers first met. One of them, Tyler Reid, went on to write a PhD thesis on using satellites in low-earth orbit to improve navigation. The group spent informal gatherings over "pizza and beer chats" debating whether the shortcomings of existing navigation networks could support a business.

Those shortcomings are well understood. Government satellite networks provide enormous value, but they are easy to jam and are not precise enough to be relied on alone for applications such as farming robots or self-driving cars. Xona's answer was to build a system that supplements rather than simply duplicates what governments already offer.

The company's first hurdle was technical. A stronger signal with more precise timing and location data required a novel architecture — one that would let Xona's satellites keep accurate time without carrying expensive atomic clocks. The workaround relies on the spacecraft's proximity to Earth and continuous communication with ground-based sources of truth.

Working with the hardware already sold

The second challenge was compatibility. For a new navigation service to reach the market quickly, it has to work with devices already in customers' hands. Xona solved this by designing its signals to be received by existing GPS receivers after a relatively simple software modification. That decision gives the company immediate access to an installed base and eases its path through the regulatory process for broadcasting navigation signals.

That regulatory dimension matters because navigation signals are tightly governed. Broadcasting a new one is not purely an engineering problem; it requires authorization from the bodies that coordinate the radio spectrum governments have long controlled. Xona's compatibility-first approach was designed with that constraint in mind.

Six satellites, two designs

The launch scheduled for later this month will carry six satellites on a SpaceX rocket. Four of them are similar to a prototype the company launched last year that proved its technology, and those satellites are built around a satellite platform from Aerospace Labs. The remaining two were built entirely by Xona at its Burlingame, California headquarters.

Those two in-house satellites are intended to be the foundation of a much larger system: a 258-satellite operational constellation the company calls Pulsar. The mix of heritage hardware and bespoke spacecraft reflects a company trying to move quickly while still validating its own manufacturing capability.

Once the satellites are in orbit, they will pass overhead the mid-latitudes roughly eight times a day, which is enough for Xona to begin beta-testing Pulsar with real customers.

Centimeters instead of meters

The performance claim at the center of Xona's pitch is precision. Pulsar is designed to offer centimeter-level geolocation, compared with the meter-level precision GPS provides. Its signal is also intended to be strong enough to be detected inside buildings and in dense urban environments, where conventional satellite navigation often degrades or fails.

That signal strength carries a second, security-adjacent benefit. Xona CEO Brian Manning believes the signal is powerful enough to deter would-be jammers and spoofers — the interference techniques that have grown more common in conflicts and that have repeatedly disrupted civilian navigation. The company is not framing itself primarily as a security vendor, but resistance to interference is embedded in its design goals.

One early customer is already lined up to move once the satellites are aloft. Ian Gough, the CEO of TimeBeat, a company specializing in electronic timing, said the initial pilot will allow his engineers to check and correct the timing provided by its devices around the world. Xona hopes to offer full coverage in the U.S., Europe, Japan, and South Korea by 2028.

The case for charging for navigation

Manning's early reaction to the idea was skepticism. He described it as his first instinct during a visit by TechCrunch to the company's headquarters.

"My knee jerk was like, this is dumb," Xona CEO Brian Manning told TechCrunch during a recent visit to the company's headquarters. "Why would anybody replace GPS? It's free, right? And I started digging into it. People think of GPS as a free service, but the market isn't the service. The market's the hardware, and you have billions of devices being sold every year; those things aren't being given away for free. There's an immense market that is desperately looking for better performance."

— Brian Manning, CEO of Xona Space Systems

The argument rests on where value actually accumulates. The satellite service is free to users, but the receivers and devices built around it are sold in enormous volumes every year. If a private signal delivers meaningfully better performance, the company reasons, hardware makers and their customers have a reason to pay for it.

Money, government interest, and time

Xona has raised just over $300 million from venture investors since its founding, including $20 million from the U.S. Space Force. That government investment is notable for a company whose product competes with a government-funded service, and it reflects Washington's interest in navigation technology that is harder to jam or spoof. Jamming and spoofing of satellite navigation services have become increasingly common in conflicts, and the U.S. government is clearly attentive to the vulnerability.

As for the potential customer base, the company frames it in the billions. That scale is what makes the economics plausible at all: a per-device or per-license fee can be small and still add up when the addressable market is measured in the world's fleet of connected hardware.

Built for the era of autonomy

Looking further out, Xona is positioning itself for a world of expanding automation. Reid, whose thesis inspired the company and who now serves as its CTO, worked on self-driving cars at Ford and concluded that a service like Pulsar would be needed to realize the potential of autonomous vehicles of all kinds. The precision and reliability required by a vehicle making decisions at speed are well beyond what a meter-level signal can guarantee alone.

The comparison Manning reaches for is aviation. From Xona's headquarters there is a clear view of planes landing at San Francisco International Airport, and he points to civil aviation as the benchmark.

"all the forms of mass transportation, the gold standard for safety is civil aviation. We see Xona and what we're building being able to play a big part in that … to provide the service to a car, so you can feel as safe taking your hands off the wheel as you are laying back in an airliner."

— Brian Manning, CEO of Xona Space Systems

Whether a private constellation can match the reliability record of government systems that have been refined over decades is an open question, and one that will be answered in the field rather than in a pitch deck.

What a second signal changes

For businesses that depend on location and timing — logistics fleets, agricultural equipment, financial trading infrastructure that relies on precise clocks — a credible second source of navigation data could matter for reasons beyond accuracy. Redundancy against interference is a resilience question. If one signal can be jammed, having an alternative with a different architecture is a meaningful hedge, provided it works as advertised.

For consumers, the near-term change is likely to be invisible. Xona is not launching a consumer app; it is selling a signal to device makers and service providers. Any benefit would arrive indirectly, through products that ship with better positioning.

The broader significance is structural. If a venture-backed company can build a viable commercial alternative to a service governments have provided for free, it raises a question other space-based utilities may eventually face: which functions are best left as public goods, and which can sustain a business. Xona's answer will be tested by whether its satellites perform, whether regulators permit a wide rollout, and whether enough customers pay for precision they have never had to buy before.