Dr. Ilva Marchetti
Co-founder & Chief Executive
Formerly flight systems lead on two planetary landers. Believes procurement, not physics, is what keeps humanity on one planet.
Company
We build for places nobody can reach
XNANU was founded in 2021 on a single thesis: work beyond Earth has to be autonomous, and autonomy has to be provable.
Mission
Make other worlds workable
Humanity is not held on one planet by physics. It is held here by the cost and fragility of everything we send. A machine that needs a human decision every twenty minutes cannot build a road, let alone a habitat.
We design robots that arrive first, work for years and hand over a site that is ready for people — with a signed record of every bolt they turned.
Principles
How we work
01
Distance is the design constraint
We assume nobody is coming to help and no command will arrive in time. Everything else follows from that.
02
Build hardware, not slideware
Every claim on this site is traceable to a test report. If we have not measured it, we do not publish it.
03
Autonomy must be explainable
A machine that cannot account for its decisions has no business operating a habitat that people will breathe inside.
04
Earth benefits first
Machines that survive Mars make mining, energy and disaster response safer here. We ship those capabilities back.
History
Five years, six systems
- 2021
Founded in Zürich
Four engineers from planetary science, industrial robotics and control theory start XNANU with a single thesis: off-world work must be autonomous.
- 2022
Nexus v1 on hardware
The autonomy stack drives its first wheeled platform through an unmapped quarry with no operator input.
- 2024
Atacama test range
A permanent analogue site opens at 3,100 m altitude, where dust, radiation and thermal swing come for free.
- 2025
Atlas and Forge revealed
Assembly and resource extraction join the portfolio, turning exploration hardware into construction hardware.
- 2026
Series C, serial production
US$740m closes. Bremen opens. Six systems enter qualification for a 2029 surface demonstration.
Inside XNANU
Six years of field work
Leadership
Who runs XNANU
Tobias Reiner
Co-founder & Chief Technology Officer
Built industrial autonomy stacks for underground mining before deciding the hardest tunnels are on other worlds.
Nadir Haddad
Chief Operating Officer
Scaled two European hardware companies from prototype to serial production. Runs Bremen and the Atacama range.
Dr. Stefan Brandt
Head of Autonomy
Works on the part nobody demonstrates in a video: proving that an autonomous decision was permitted before it was taken.
Locations
Where we are
Zürich
Switzerland
Headquarters & autonomy
XNANU AGFörrlibuckstrasse 1108005 ZürichBremen
Germany
Assembly & integration
XNANU Systems GmbHAirbus-Allee 1428199 BremenToulouse
France
Flight systems
XNANU France SAS12 Rue de la Découverte31670 LabègeAntofagasta
Chile
Atacama analogue range
XNANU Field OperationsRuta 23 Km 74AntofagastaCareers
Build the machines that go first
We are hiring engineers who want their code to survive a Martian winter.