Xona Space Systems reviews

Compensation for the new openings is low by Bay Area standards. For hiring push, recruiting instituted a monthly meeting for staff to mine personal relationships to fill openings. For an hour in a conference room with recruiting walking around looking over your shoulder, you copy the scripted message and send to friends, former colleagues, etc. Do you really want to advocate a job that pays say 20-40% less than market to your friends? How is executive management on board with this. Emphasis on aesthetics. Every so often, CEO sends out a message: be in the office on this day because someone important is showing up. In other words, look like you’re working. Office is perpetually being redecorated and some of it seems to be purely for aesthetics, like the lobby and placement of the swag table seem to change up every couple months. Once a year, there’s an onsite All Hands with staff from Canadian and UK offices flown in for attendance. During the last onsite, there was a nearly two-hour presentation on new company logo/branding. Didn’t seem to be the best use of everyone’s time for half an afternoon. Putting all of the above together gives the sense that employees are not valued as contributors but are disposable tools.

Funding has been much less than other space industry startups the past 5 years. Was pre-seed 6 years ago and only has one bird up and being tested. Had a major layoff in January 2024 including most of the experienced engineers outside of the founders. Small Series A in 2024, but finally got Series B round of $90M in mid 2025 after 18 months, but need 258 satellites to build, orbit, and test, the complete constellation before providing full service. Very big question on how they will actually produce revenue given GPS and other GNSS services are basically free and are improving accuracy and security at a faster pace. Over-hyped on social media imo, and in the news whenever they can advertise, being where they actually are in the system development. Seemed to have intentionally white-washed fact that they had a major layoff before Series B, and the existence of the original team that developed most of their waveform design is gone. A couple of key personnel have left since the layoff also, including a co-founder and a highly respected well-known, highly respected GNSS engineer, as well as a key payload person. Salaries they can pay are hard to survive on in bay area, hence mostly hiring new or recent grads 2-3 years experience or less. Need more funding to survive imo, since as mentioned the founding team put the groundwork for Xona together in 2019, so entering 7th year of existence with a total of maybe $155M of VC (pre-seed throught Series B), but estimates to just get full constellation up is probably upwards of $600M. Time will tell if this on-going capital cycle in space spending which is getting into bubble territory, will last long enough for them to get funding to survive. Recent hype on social media seems like an exit plan is already in the works for VC's and management, especially since they are 258 satellites away from from a full constellation.