Six Pulsar satellites are preparing to launch this month, beginning the deployment of our commercial satellite navigation service. At the same time, we’re starting the next phase of manufacturing and operations needed to build out the full 250+ satellite constellation.
We’re now moving into rate production, expanding our manufacturing footprint, and building the team to do it.
Leadership for the next phase of Pulsar
We’re excited to share that Patrick Cadariu has joined Xona as Chief Operations Officer. Patrick spent nearly a decade in operations leadership at Waymo, helping scale the manufacturing and supply chain behind its autonomous vehicle fleet. At Xona, he’ll lead manufacturing, supply chain and operations as we accelerate deployment of Pulsar’s full 250+ satellite constellation.
After enabling Waymo’s technology to move from development to commercial scale, Patrick is excited to get started on building the machine behind the machine for another groundbreaking technology - the world’s most advanced positioning, navigation, and timing infrastructure to strengthen the backbone services that power critical infrastructure for billions of people, daily.
“There is a point with every breakthrough technology where the challenge shifts from proving that it works to proving that you can build it again and again. Pulsar has reached that point.”
Patrick Cadariu, Chief Operations Officer of Xona
Patrick brings decades of experience across supply chain management and manufacturing into this new role; which taught him the extreme value of controlling the parts of the system that allow an organization to learn and iterate quickly. For Xona, that will mean strategically bringing pieces in house, like satellite design, that give us more control over timelines, cost, and quality as we ramp.
Beginning Rate Production
The next four Pulsar spacecraft are now entering production at our Burlingame factory, representing the next evolution of the architecture developed through our first internally designed and manufactured flight articles which launch this month aboard SpaceX’s Bandwagon-5 mission.
Moving into rate production isn’t simply about building the same spacecraft faster. What we learn from each build feeds into the next, allowing us to improve both the spacecraft and how we manufacture it with every generation.
“Our first spacecraft taught us an enormous amount about both the satellite and how to manufacture it. The challenge now is not simply learning how to build the same satellite faster. It is learning how to build each one faster while making the next one better.”
Brian Manning, Co-founder and CEO of Xona.
Production in Xona’s facility in Burlingame, California will continue to scale rapidly throughout 2027, with Xona on track to reach capacity to produce multiple satellites per week by year-end.
Expanding our global footprint
We opened our Montréal office in 2024, establishing Xona’s first permanent presence outside the United States and expanding our internal technical capabilities. Since then, our team in Canada has led critical work to advance the Pulsar ecosystem, making it easier than ever for people to build devices that can leverage Pulsar’s signal when it becomes available. As Xona moves into constellation deployment, we’re building naturally on that foundation with an expansion of our footprint in the region to support our future growth.
We’re adding 35,000 square feet of manufacturing and mission operations capacity at the historic aerospace site where Alouette I, Canada’s first satellite, was built. The expansion will complement spacecraft production in Burlingame and provide additional capacity to vertically integrate select technologies for future Pulsar spacecraft.
Bringing more of these capabilities in house will help shorten development cycles, improve performance and cost, and give Xona greater flexibility across its supply chain.
The Montréal site will also become one of Xona’s mission operations hubs, expanding the global ground infrastructure supporting the Pulsar constellation as it scales.
