Xona, a California startup building a satellite navigation network in low Earth orbit, has raised $250 million at a $2.45 billion valuation. Steve Jurvetson’s Future Ventures led the Series D, Xona said on Thursday .

The round comes seven months after a $170 million Series C. It takes Xona’s total funding since 2019 past $570 million. Future Ventures put in $78.5 million, Forbes reported .

“We started the year with technically an empty warehouse, and now we have a functional satellite factory,” Brian Manning, Xona’s co-founder and chief executive, told Forbes.

Manning, a former SpaceX engineer, said the company had not planned to raise again so soon. It did so after a surge in demand, he said.

A commercial rival to GPS

Xona’s network, called Pulsar, is built to run alongside GPS, which the US government operates. The company says Pulsar’s signals are up to 100 times more powerful than GPS and accurate to the centimetre.…