Xona Space Systems raises $170M Series C and opens San Francisco satellite factory to build GPS alternative

progress in AI broadly. So congratulations. What what a fantastic story.

Thank you so much.

Great to meet you.

Have a great rest of your day. We'll talk to you soon. Goodbye.

All right. Yeah.

Up next, we have Brian Manning from Zona Space coming in with a new series C announcement building a GPS alternative network.

Brian,

what a setup.

Beautiful setup. I assume you're in your factory. Take us through uh an introduction on yourself, the company, and where you are.

Thanks, guys. Yeah, know it's super excited to be here. It's been an exciting day. We're uh fresh off this morning uh the announcements and launch of our new satellite factory here in San Francisco uh which coming on the heels of our $178 million series C raise uh that we announced a couple weeks ago.

Thank you. So a lot of exciting things happening. U so what what we're doing what we're building here is we're basically building a new GPS.

Yeah. And so we're building a network of these small satellites that are 20 times closer to Earth than existing GPS to provide extremely high accuracy, extremely high reliability navigation capabilities. You know, I came from SpaceX. Our CTO came from Ford. Originally, the company was designed around providing autonomous vehicles, the level of certainty and accuracy need they really need to scale. But we started finding pretty quickly after that that there are 7 billion plus GPS devices around the world. every single one of them is looking for better performance and that's exactly what we're we're building a network here to provide.

Okay. So, uh 258 satellites going into low earth orbit. You're building them in that factory I assume. But, uh you're probably have a you know deep supply chain and partnership. I imagine that they launch on other rockets. Um uh what what is uh what is key about what you're building? Where are you partnering? where are you doing R&D uh before the actual satellites get built and sent to space?

Yeah, for sure. It's a good question. So, with satellite navigation, most people always focus on the satellites cuz satellites are cool and that's always the fun thing to focus on. Um but a satnav system is really three pieces that you have the ground segment which is you know mission operations kind of control segment. You've got the satellites and then you've got the user equipment. And then the user equipment is is arguably the most important, but it's also the most overlooked. So, we are building the satellites, we're building the ground segment, and then we've partnered to integrate our capabilities into all the different user equipment that's out there. And so, that's the chips that would go into, you know, everything from a a dog collar to a phone to a tractor to a car to military devices and everything in between. Yeah. We've designed our capability to be just a software update so that you know we can integrate in with these you know billions of devices that are are going out there. Um and we've been able to demonstrate that on over a dozen different receivers um with the satellite that we launched last year that's up in the air now.

Got it. So uh yeah can you give me an example of So a dog collar has a GPS uh chip in it. It's currently interfacing with uh satellites that are higher in orbit and uh with a software update, you won't actually need to swap out the chip. You'll be able to get uh more accurate uh GPS data. What is the benefit of this particular new new constellation?

For sure. So there's three big areas that we've seen customers really need better capability and it is we try and make it simple to remember by precision, power and protection. So there are some customers that are, you know, GPS in the automotive world, for example, can tell you, a human driver kind of reliably what road they're on, where our system is designed to extremely reliably tell them not only what lane they're in, but if they're in the center of that lane or not.

Well, we deliver that through a signal that's 100 times stronger than GPS, which means it's strong enough to punch through jamming. It's punch through trees, even punch through a couple walls. So, back to the dog collar. Right now, everybody just accepts that like when you walk inside or when you go indoors or you go into your house, GPS just kind of disappears and location, you know, doesn't really show up anymore.

With ours, our signal is strong enough so that you you can see if phto in the kitchen or in the backyard or at least knowing where they are at all. Uh where you just can't do today with an existing GPS. I heard this story years ago that I have no idea if it's true that G the the current GPS constellation is higher resolution for military applications than for civilian applications and the technology is not actually the problem. It's more that there are specific rules about the level of resolution that GPS data is is like turned over to private companies. Is that true at all?

Sort of. So there there's bits of that that are are true and some I think there are just some misunderstandings.

Okay.

Uh that are pretty common in the world. So the military does have a different um GPS service than civilians do. The big difference between the civilian GPS and the military GPS though isn't the accuracy. It's actually more on the security aspects. And so there's more protections that exist on the military service um to prevent, you know, bad actors from being able to fake the signal or being able to use the signal. And that's one of the big gaps in the civilian market today is that they don't have access to a service that gives the the level of protection that's needed. And so you can kind of think of it a GPS signal. Imagine taking your social security number and your date of birth and your mother's maiden name and everything and putting it on a postcard and mailing it through the mail. That's kind of what GPS is today that everything is just wide open. Um where what we're providing is a capability that's more similar to the military one where everything is secure, encrypted, protected, but making that available to civilians so that you know you can trust taking your hands off the wheel in the autonomous car and know that that signal is coming from us that it has the protection. Uh it's not coming from a bad actor.

Okay. So the software update handles like it sort of enables the encryption uh as well I assume.

Yeah. So effectively you can almost think of our service in a similar way to you know if GPS is like FM radio it's the free service. We're more similar to like XM radio or satellite radio where we broadcast out and everyone can listen to it but until you type in the subscription key

you don't know

the data doesn't work.

Yeah that makes sense. That that's what I was going to ask like business business model but um

uh how how big or small are current GPS devices if you want to basically have an air tag that you can throw in your shoe so you can be uh so you can know where you are or the dog collar. This feels like there's a we've been on a miniaturization path for a long time. Where are we now? Where are we going?

Yeah. So the the size of the device, I mean, we've got chipsets that we're working with that are I think like 3 mm by 3 millimeters. So it's something that's you probably 10 of them on the end of your out of your hand.

Yeah.

Um it's GPS is really one of the superpowers of GPS and what we're building also is that it is a one directional broadcast. So it's a receive only signal that it doesn't do. Your GPS device

like GPS doesn't know where you are. It only can tell you where you are. So there's no personal privacy concerns or anything like that. It just gives you the data to figure out where you are. Y

and that enables it to also be used in these ultra low power devices because they just have to listen. They don't have to actually talk back. Yeah.

So it enables you to provide this into you know as you pointed out things like the dog collar, the cow tracker. You know we've even seen people with like peel and stick packaging labels that we're we're starting to work with that you can put on the side of FedEx package to track it. Wow. So it is getting into smaller smaller devices and in the world of AI everything wants to know where it's at.

Yeah.

And the more accuracy you can provide with more availability and just enabling these things to know where they're at more of the time unlocks so many new insights and you know logistics visibility and whatnot that that really just doesn't exist today when GPS can't get into the place where the thing is at.

Tell us more about the factory. Um,

yeah. And and you know, hard a lot of the the sort of space companies that come on the show are obvious are based out in Southern California. What have been what have been the pros and cons of building uh in the Bay Area?

For sure. That's very good question. That's something we we've had people ask before. If you open up our satellite and look inside of it and we laid it out on a table, most people look at it and say, "This looks like the guts of a desktop computer." There's a bunch of circuit boards. I mean there's certainly solar panels and propulsion systems and other things around it but the the core like the heart of it and a lot of pieces that that we've designed and built internally here have a lot more in common with a desktop computer than they do with you know 747 and LA has you know a lot of great talent a lot of you know big aerospace talent with Silicon Valley is in many ways you know the heart of compute yeah

all these you know the chipsets and a lot of the the talent the people that we're looking for you know it's a lot of electrical engineering a lot of software engineering ing a lot of mechanical engineering to put the pieces together. Uh which is you know the whole founding team came from Stanford. Um so we all kind of naturally landed here which which had the right resources around us. Uh the factory that we're stood up here is you modeled more after you know a supercar assembly line than it is after a typical satellite assembly line. And so it's something that you know this satellite factory is built to start providing you know multiple satellites per week where to put that in context the US currently produces maybe two navigation satellites in a year. Uh where with what we're building here you we can produce that many satellites in a week which really just brings an entirely new capability to the world at a pace that's never been possible before.

What's the regulatory side of the the the picture? Do you have to get uh FCC clearance for your designs? Is there a is there a wait and see period? Is that being accelerated at all by new tools and the ability to proofread documents with AI? Anything like that?

It's Yeah. So you very uh astute question from the space world that anything spectrum related. We started working in the spectrum engineering years before we started working any of the satellite engineering because we knew that that would be the biggest challenge. And one of the things that we've done that's very unique is with all the spectrum engineering we've done, we basically figured out how to provide a service that is in the GPS bands right next to the GPS signals without actually causing any sort of interference to those signals, which is incredibly difficult to do because you GPS broadcasts at about the power of a light bulb from an earth and a half away from Earth in distance. And so it was just such an incredibly weak signal that there's a lot of people that told us when we started the company like there's no way you'll ever figure out how to put a high power signal next to these GPS signals without causing interference.

And a lot of people still didn't want to believe it until we launched the satellite last year and were able to show look there's our signal, there's GPS, it's 100% fine.

Um and it's it's not only say fine, it's it's really necessary in the world today with so much you know electronic warfare and jamming and other things. You really need these high power signals to be able to fend off interference, whether that's interference from, you know, a wall or a roof or interference from somebody trying to jam the signal and prevent uh the capability from getting through.

Yeah. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. Well, congratulations on the new factory. Thank you so much for coming on and breaking it down for us.

Thank you guys so much for having us here soon.

Yeah. Have a great rest of your

We'll talk to you soon. Thanks. Up next we have Cody Blumenfeld Gance from Chapter raising a series E to expand Medicare navigation and launch financial products.

Not with us the waiting room.

We're waiting uh in the

ACA got his M64

and he showed the packaging. It says brought to you by the crack team at Mod Retro.

At Mod Retro

Crack Team.

The Crack over there. I saw some people playing cruising cruising USA cruising world. Maybe something like that. Uh, this is gonna be fun.

What do What do you think they mean by crack team though?

Crack team.

If you look at this, if you look at the