Xona Space Systems, a Burlingame, California-based company recently closed a $170 million Series C funding round to scale up its commercial Positioning, Navigation, and Timing (PNT) Pulsar satellite network and continues to expand its activities in Canada.
The company, which selected Montreal for its first international office in September 2024, was a graduate of the Creative Destruction Lab space stream in 2021. Shortly after graduating, the company received a Canadian Space Agency (CSA) SmartEarth grant worth $495,120 for research related to “Enabling Advanced Remote Sensing and Navigation Applications from a Commercial PNT Satellite Constellation.”
The company has since received an additional $2.15 million in funds from various government departments for PNT technology development including a $958,582 contribution from the CSA in September, 2024.
The goal seems straightforward. The company wants to build a commercially owned navigation system in low Earth orbit (LEO) that can serve as a robust alternative to traditional government GPS. With its first production satellite launched in June of 2025, Xona plans to move quickly to deploy the full constellation.
Flush with new capital, the company is turning its attention to northern infrastructure. In late May the company announced it was teaming up with Innovation, Science and Economic Development Canada (ISED) and the National Research Council of Canada (NRC). The partnership will demonstrate how Canada’s official UTC time standard can be distributed through the Pulsar network. While the company only has one active satellite in orbit, the plan is to have 258 satellites provide continuous, global coverage. Xona said it expects to launch an additional four satellites this year.
Traditional GPS was built during the Cold War with a focus on mid-latitude regions. This design creates a problem for northern operators.
“In the Arctic today, one of the big challenges is that GPS was not designed for the Arctic,” Tyler Reid, co-founder and Chief Technology Officer of Xona, explained during a recent BNN Bloomberg interview. “It was designed to service the mid-latitudes and so the major cities. And so that means in north of Edmonton, we don’t have satellites overhead anymore, which leads to a lot of degradation in the service in the Arctic.”
According to the CSA, the Xona system changes the equation. The CSA points out that Xona’s satellites fly much closer to Earth than legacy GPS hardware. This proximity means the signals are up to 100 times stronger and much harder for bad actors to jam or disrupt. By maintaining a steady presence over the poles, the Pulsar network will give aviation crews, shipping vessels, and remote communities a reliable source of positioning and timing data.
This enhanced resilience is increasingly vital to Canada’s defence sector and sovereignty operations in the Arctic. Relying entirely on U.S. Air Force GPS satellites for navigation is becoming a strategic risk in an era of contested airspace and electronic warfare, where adversaries routinely employ signal jamming.
As Canada executes its $38.6 billion NORAD modernization plan—which prioritizes LEO architectures and alternative positioning technologies—commercial networks like Pulsar offer a localized backup. This strategic value is highlighted by a recent $850,000 investment through Defence Research and Development Canada’s (DRDC) Canadian Safety and Security Program. This funding supports Xona’s infrastructure partnership with ISED and the NRC to demonstrate how their resilient timing capability can shield Canada’s critical telecom, energy, and military operations from severe GPS disruptions. By integrating cryptographically secure, jam-resistant signals with a domestic time standard, Canada plans to secure the precise data required not just to run future logistics networks, but to maintain a strong defence posture in the Arctic.