Today, Xona opened the doors to its new satellite manufacturing facility in California, joined by Congressman Kevin Mullin, Stuart Riley, VP of Engineering at Trimble, and leaders from across the space and technology ecosystem.

The event marked a major step toward building the next generation of global navigation infrastructure. From this facility, Xona will produce and deploy a constellation of over 250 American-built satellites over the next five years, at a total cost lower than a single traditional GPS satellite in orbit today.

Xona Co-founder & CEO Brian Manning emphasized how the facility marks a shift from demonstration to true scale, fundamentally changing the economics and timelines of navigation infrastructure. 

“What used to take billions of dollars and decades to build, we’re now doing in years. The entire Pulsar constellation will be built right here, inside this decade, for the cost of one GPS satellite on orbit today. Here, we’re not just proving Pulsar’s capability can exist, but that we also have the means and resources to build it at scale.”

- Xona Co-founder and CEO, Brian Manning

Xona Co-Founder & CEO Brian Manning gives remarks.

Congressman Mullin emphasized the urgency of building more resilient navigation infrastructure and the importance of U.S. leadership in advancing it. He pointed to the need to create solutions that are harder to disrupt, faster to evolve, and better suited to the world we live in today. 

“We’re working to strengthen domestic manufacturing, invest in advanced technologies, and support the full pipeline—from research to production—that makes innovation real. Because if we don’t build these systems here, they will be built somewhere else. And we will be living on infrastructure defined by others.”

- Congressman Kevin Mullin

Congressman Kevin Mullin signs a solar panel that will be apart of the first Pulsar satellite built in Burlingame, launching this October.

Xona was founded to address a growing gap between where technology is heading and what existing navigation systems can support. We’re building smaller satellites in Low Earth Orbit that are entirely software defined. This, alongside architectural advantages that avoid the need for costly atomic clocks and other bespoke components lets us scale using a commercial model. That allows us to dramatically reduce costs while deploying a much larger, more flexible system.

The Burlingame facility serves as an integration and assembly site and is part of a broader effort to build a resilient, secure supply chain. The facility was made possible by Xona’s recently closed $170M Series C. In addition to building manufacturing capacity in Burlingame, Xona is also expanding its Montreal operations to accelerate its path to scale. View open roles on Xona’s team.