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Building the Next Generation of GPS: Xona Space’s Blueprint for Hard-Tech Success

GPS powers everything from financial grids to autonomous vehicles, but its core architecture hasn’t fundamentally changed since the 1960s. While our devices and their needs have evolved dramatically, the navigation technology they rely on remains largely the same.

In a recent episode of Category Visionaries, Brian Manning, CEO and Co-founder of Xona Space, shared how his company is addressing this technological gap with a revolutionary approach to satellite navigation. With over $40 million in funding, Xona is developing a constellation of small satellites in low Earth orbit designed to provide the centimeter-level accuracy that modern applications desperately need.

When the Technology You Need Doesn’t Exist, Build It

The story of Xona Space begins not with a flashy startup pitch but with a PhD thesis collecting dust on a shelf.

While working at Ford’s autonomous vehicle division, Xona’s CTO Tyler Reid encountered a fundamental limitation: self-driving cars needed reliable centimeter-level positioning accuracy to operate safely in all conditions, but GPS could only reliably provide accuracy measured in meters.

“Tyler went to work at Ford in their navigation department out in their autonomous division here in California,” Brian explains. “A lot of what he was responsible for there was researching what systems and technologies can very reliably keep self-driving cars and hands-free capabilities… how do you keep these vehicles centered in their lane, but how do you do it in a manner that works in any environment?”

The solution lay in Tyler’s PhD research at Stanford’s GPS lab, where he had explored how small satellites in low Earth orbit could dramatically improve navigation performance. The theoretical foundation existed, but no one had built it.

This gap between what existing technology could provide and what modern applications required became the driving force behind Xona Space.

Breaking Down the Impossible

When Brian first pitched Xona’s vision at an accelerator event in London, an Air Force veteran in the audience asked bluntly: “So you’re going to build a new GPS… how are you going to do that?”

It’s a question that encapsulates the challenge of building hard tech startups. Unlike software companies that can iterate quickly with minimal capital, space technology demands significant upfront investment, years of development, and the ability to solve extraordinarily complex technical challenges before generating revenue.

Brian’s response was refreshingly pragmatic: “We’re going to do it one step at a time… You solve one problem and you solve the next. And if you solve enough of them, you’re successful.”

This incremental approach has become Xona’s blueprint for tackling seemingly impossible challenges:

1. First, they validated their core satellite technology in the lab
2. Then they proved it worked on the ground
3. Next came a demonstration satellite to validate the concept in space
4. Now they’re preparing to launch their first production-class satellite in June

Each milestone unlocked new funding opportunities and brought them closer to their vision. Rather than trying to build the entire system at once, they methodically derisked the most challenging components first.

The Three Pillars of Next-Generation GPS

GPS limitations span far beyond autonomous vehicles. As Brian points out, “There’s 7 billion other devices around the planet that use GPS today… GPS is this monster that powers everything from financial grids to power grids, even our entire financial system depends on it.”

Xona identified three key challenges that a modern navigation system needs to address:

“Users either need higher levels of precision, power, or protection,” Brian explains. “Precision” refers to accuracy – GPS can tell you what road you’re on, but autonomous vehicles need to know which lane they’re in and their exact position within it. “Power” addresses signal strength – modern devices operate indoors, under tree canopies, in urban canyons, and other challenging environments where GPS signals struggle to penetrate. “Protection” ensures that navigation signals are authentic and cannot be spoofed or jammed.

By designing specifically for these three pillars, Xona is creating a navigation system optimized for modern needs rather than adapting a 60-year-old architecture to new use cases.

Making Innovation Compatible with Reality

One of the most remarkable aspects of Xona’s approach is their commitment to ensuring compatibility with existing infrastructure. Rather than requiring users to overhaul their entire hardware stack, Xona’s system works with most current GPS receivers through software updates.

“We’ve designed our system to be compatible with most GPS receivers, even without making any hardware changes,” Brian says. “That’s super key that, you know, there’s 2 billion or so new GPS devices sold every year, and if you try and go to the customers that are buying those devices and say, ‘Hey, I’ve got this great service, all you need to do is add a new antenna, add a new chipset,’ it’s a pretty tough sell.”

This decision dramatically lowers adoption barriers and expands Xona’s potential market. Instead of competing with GPS, they’re complementing it – addressing its shortcomings while leveraging its massive installed base.

When Too Much Demand Becomes the Problem

Many startups struggle to find product-market fit, but Xona faced the opposite challenge: overwhelming interest from too many markets simultaneously.

“There are just so many use cases and so many potential applications that our pipeline of interest and demand is kind of so huge that we can’t actually pursue all of it,” Brian admits. “We’ve had to really focus on what are the core markets, who’s going to adopt this in the early stages of the system.”

Rather than trying to serve everyone poorly, they’ve maintained laser focus on specific markets where early adoption makes the most sense. For other potential customers, they continue engagement, testing, and sharing results, but without diluting their primary focus.

This strategic prioritization has allowed them to make meaningful progress despite limited resources – a crucial discipline for hard tech startups with long development cycles.

Silencing Skeptics with Results

When building something that many consider impossible, skepticism comes with the territory. Rather than wasting energy on defensive arguments, Xona lets their demonstrations speak for themselves.

“Generally the people that we hear saying it won’t work, when we show them test results that it’s working, they’re a little quieter,” Brian says. “So far we’ve gotten pretty good at proving people wrong.”

This results-oriented approach has served them well in both technical development and fundraising. Each successful milestone has unlocked new opportunities and converted skeptics into supporters.

Beyond Luxury: Building Technology that Matters

Perhaps most compelling is Xona’s vision for the impact of their technology. While improved navigation has obvious commercial applications, Brian is driven by more fundamental human needs.

“I’m much more interested in how you get the autonomous ambulance to go drive through the snowstorm when a human can’t,” he explains. “How do you take the benefits of precision agriculture, which the benefits of precision agriculture are just staggering… and bring those benefits into developing countries, into areas where water shortages and labor shortages and things are really crippling?”

This vision of democratizing access to transformative technologies – making capabilities that start as “luxury toys” into “commonplace, affordable things that are part of everyday life around the world” – provides a north star for the company’s development.

The Path Forward

With their first production-class satellite scheduled for launch in June 2024, Xona stands at the threshold of turning their vision into a commercial reality. They’ve secured significant partnerships, including an Air Force contract to demonstrate their capabilities with off-the-shelf GPS equipment.

The launch will enable them to start providing “intermittent beta level capability” to early customers – a crucial step in validating their business model and gathering real-world feedback.

For founders building hard tech startups or tackling seemingly impossible challenges, Xona’s journey offers valuable lessons: break down massive problems into solvable components, prioritize ruthlessly when faced with too many opportunities, design for compatibility with existing infrastructure, and let results silence skeptics.

Most importantly, they demonstrate that with patience, persistence, and the right strategic approach, it’s possible to build technology that seems unimaginably complex – even something as audacious as a new GPS system for the modern world.