Company:Starcloud

From HandWiki
Starcloud, Inc.
TypePrivate
IndustrySpace
FoundedJanuary 2024; 2 years ago (2024-01) in El Segundo, California, US
FoundersPhilip Johnston
Ezra Feilden
Adi Oltean
Headquarters
Redmond, Washington
,
US
Key people
Philip Johnston (CEO)
Ezra Feilden (CTO)
Adi Oltean (Chief Engineer)
Chetan Puttagunta (Board Member)
Number of employees
15 (2026)
Websitewww.starcloud.com

Starcloud, Inc. is a United States-based company that designs, builds, and deploys data centers in space using proprietary technology.[1][2][3][4][5] In November, 2025, Starcloud launched a satellite with the first NVIDIA H100, which enabled it to train the first AI model in space. [6]

In March 2026, Starcloud became the fastest unicorn in Y Combinator history, hitting a $1.1bn valuation just 17 months after completing the program.[7] In August 2026, Starcloud raised an additional $250M at a $2.3Bn valuation, with NVIDIA, Cisco, and Benchmark investing in the round.[8]

History

The company was founded in January 2024 in El Segundo, California under the name Lumen Orbit by Philip Johnston (ex-McKinsey & Company), Adi Oltean (ex-SpaceX, Microsoft Azure) and Ezra Feilden (ex-Airbus Defence and Space).[1][9] Soon after founding, in February 2024, the company relocated to Redmond, Washington to be close to the space and data center talent at Starlink, Amazon Leo, AWS, and Azure.[10]

In Summer 2024, the company released a white paper[11][12][13] and went through the Y Combinator startup accelerator in San Francisco, where they were selected by Tom Blomfield and raised one of the largest seed rounds ever at Y Combinator demo day.[14]

In March 2025, the company rebranded to Starcloud after a legal challenge from Lumen Technologies and raised additional seed funding, bringing the total to approximately $34M.[15][16][17][18] Investors include the scout funds of Sequoia and A16z, In-Q-Tel, NFX, Plug and Play, as well as angels, including AI expert Jan Leike.[19]

In November 2025, Starcloud launched its first test satellite, designated Starcloud-1, equipped with a Nvidia H100 GPU which Nvidia claimed was 100x more powerful GPU compute than had been in orbit before.[20] The company described the mission as the first deployment of "data-center-class GPU compute" in orbit.[21][22][23][24] File:Starcloud-1 Deployment on November 2nd 2025.webm

Starcloud stated that the project aimed to explore how orbital conditions, including continuous solar exposure and radiative cooling, could support large-scale computing in space.[25][26][27]

In December 2025, Starcloud became the first company to operate a large language model on a high powered GPU (Gemini's Gemma, developed by Google DeepMind) onboard a spacecraft, and the first to perform in-orbit training of a large language model (nanoGPT, developed by Andrej Karpathy).[28][29][30][31][32]

On February 3, 2026, Starcloud submitted a proposal to the FCC for a constellation of up to 88,000 satellites for orbital data centers.[33]

On March 7, 2026, Starcloud announced that it intended to be the first to mine Bitcoin in space, flying bitcoin mining ASICs on its second satellite,[when?] Starcloud-2.[34]

On March 30, 2026, Starcloud announced that it had raised a $170M Series A at a $1.1bn valuation led by Benchmark and EQT Ventures. The raise made Starcloud the fastest company to reach unicorn status in Y Combinator history, 17 months after completing the program.[35]

On May 26, 2026, Starcloud announced that it had signed a contract with SpaceX to integrate Starlink mini-lasers onto its next 25 satellites to provide high-bandwidth, low-latency connectivity.[36]

In August 2026, Starcloud announced it had raised an additional $250M at a $2.3Bn valuation, with NVIDIA investing $25M and Cisco and Benchmark participating in the round.[37]

Partnerships

In 2024, Starcloud was selected as a member of the Nvidia Inception program, the Google Cloud Accelerator, and the Defense Innovation Unit Accelerator.[38][39]

In October 2025, Crusoe and Starcloud announced an agreement, as Crusoe will deploy its "Crusoe Cloud" platform on a Starcloud satellite planned for late 2026. Under this agreement, GPU capacity from orbit is expected to be offered from early 2027.[citation needed]

Starcloud-1 is also using the H100 to run high-powered inference on Synthetic-aperture radar (SAR) data from Capella Space in order to draw insights on orbit for the first time, without needing to downlink the data before being able to analyse it.[citation needed]

See also

References

  1. ↑ 1.0 1.1 Werner, John. "Lumen Orbit Wants To Put Data Centers In Space" (in en). Forbes. https://www.forbes.com/sites/johnwerner/2024/12/17/lumen-orbit-wants-to-put-data-centers-in-space/. 
  2. ↑ "The answer to tech’s clean energy problem? Put data centres in space" (in en). 2025-01-05. https://www.thetimes.com/business/companies-markets/article/the-answer-to-techs-clean-energy-problem-put-data-centres-in-space-6pl9z5zbw. 
  3. ↑ "The plans to put data centres into orbit and on the moon" (in en-GB). 2025-04-09. https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cjewvpkw7weo. 
  4. ↑ "Space data centres: powering AI with solar energy" (in en). https://www.weforum.org/videos/data-centres-space/. 
  5. ↑ https://web.archive.org/web/20260202104016/https://www.starcloud.com/starcloud-2
  6. ↑ "‘Greetings, earthlings’: Nvidia-backed Starcloud trains first AI model in space as orbital data center race heats up" (in en). 2025-12-10. https://www.cnbc.com/2025/12/10/nvidia-backed-starcloud-trains-first-ai-model-in-space-orbital-data-centers.html. 
  7. ↑ Rainbow, Jason (30 March 2026). "Starcloud achieves unicorn status with 170 million raise". SpaceNews. https://spacenews.com/starcloud-achieves-unicorn-status-with-170-million-raise-for-orbital-data-centers/. 
  8. ↑ Fernholtz, Timo (21 Aug 2026). "Starcloud raises $250M for orbital data centers". TechCrunch. https://techcrunch.com/2026/08/21/starcloud-raises-200-million-for-orbital-data-centers-as-launch-options-dry-up/. 
  9. ↑ "Could data centres ever be built in orbit?". The Economist. ISSN 0013-0613. https://www.economist.com/science-and-technology/2025/04/09/could-data-centres-ever-be-built-in-orbit. 
  10. ↑ Booth, Robert (2025-11-04). "Google plans to put datacentres in space to meet demand for AI" (in en-GB). The Guardian. ISSN 0261-3077. https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2025/nov/04/google-plans-to-put-datacentres-in-space-to-meet-demand-for-ai. 
  11. ↑ "Lumen Orbit wants to deploy data centers in space" (in English). https://www.networkworld.com/article/3594676/lumen-orbit-wants-to-deploy-data-centers-in-space.html. 
  12. ↑ Monsanto, Brianna. "The future of data centers is above the clouds" (in en-us). https://www.itbrew.com/stories/2024/09/17/the-future-of-data-centers-is-above-the-clouds. 
  13. ↑ Feilden, Ezra; Oltean, Adi; Johnston, Philip (September 2024). "Why we should train AI in space" (PDF). https://starcloudinc.github.io/wp.pdf. 
  14. ↑ "Lumen Orbit Advances Space-Based AI Data Centers with $10M Funding and Nvidia Partnership" (in en-US). 2024-10-28. https://spaceinsider.tech/2024/10/28/lumen-orbit-advances-space-based-ai-data-centers-with-10m-funding-and-nvidia-partnership/. 
  15. ↑ "Lumen Orbit rebrands to Starcloud, raises another $10m for in-orbit data centers" (in en). 2025-03-03. https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/en/news/lumen-orbit-rebrands-to-starcloud-raises-another-10m-for-in-orbit-data-centers/. 
  16. ↑ "Lumen Orbit changes its name to Starcloud and raises $10M for space data centers" (in en-US). 2025-02-26. https://www.geekwire.com/2025/lumen-orbit-starcloud-10m-space-data-centers/. 
  17. ↑ Szkutak, Rebecca (2024-10-24). "Exclusive: Lumen Orbit closed one of the biggest rounds from Y Combinator's last cohort" (in en-US). https://techcrunch.com/2024/10/24/lumen-orbit-closed-one-of-the-biggest-rounds-from-y-combinators-last-cohort/. 
  18. ↑ Eaton, Kit (2024-10-25). "Here's How a Startup Landed $10 Million to Put AI Data Centers in Space" (in en). https://www.inc.com/kit-eaton/heres-how-a-startup-landed-10-million-to-put-ai-data-centers-in-space/90994829. 
  19. ↑ Szkutak, Rebecca (2024-12-11). "200 VCs wanted to get into Lumen Orbit's $11M seed round" (in en-US). https://techcrunch.com/2024/12/11/200-vcs-wanted-to-get-into-lumen-orbits-11m-seed-round/. 
  20. ↑ Tan, Eli (2026-01-01). "Even the Sky May Not Be the Limit for A.I. Data Centers" (in en-US). https://www.nytimes.com/2026/01/01/technology/space-data-centers-ai.html?smid=nytcore-android-share. 
  21. ↑ "Nvidia-backed start up Starcloud sends AI-equipped satellite to space" (in en). https://www.nbcnews.com/video/nvidia-backed-start-up-starcloud-sends-ai-equipped-satellite-to-space-251515973855. 
  22. ↑ "Starcloud-1 with NVIDIA GPU takes AI to space in November because the world is not enough" (in en). 2025-10-28. https://www.financialexpress.com/life/technology-starcloud-1-with-nvidia-gpu-takes-ai-training-to-space-in-november-heres-why-floating-data-centers-matter-4024162/. 
  23. ↑ say, Sebastian Moss Have your (2025-11-03). "Starcloud-1 satellite reaches space, with Nvidia H100 GPU now operating in orbit" (in en). https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/en/news/starcloud-1-satellite-reaches-space-with-nvidia-h100-gpu-now-operating-in-orbit/. 
  24. ↑ "SpaceX" (in en). http://www.spacex.com/. 
  25. ↑ Kurt Knutsson, CyberGuy Report (2025-10-31). "A supercomputer chip going to space could change life on Earth" (in en-US). https://www.foxnews.com/tech/supercomputer-chip-going-space-could-change-life-earth. 
  26. ↑ Fork’, ‘HARD (2025-11-26). "Video: How Will Starcloud Build Data Centers in Space?" (in en-US). The New York Times. ISSN 0362-4331. https://www.nytimes.com/video/podcasts/100000010546375/how-will-starcloud-build-data-centers-in-space.html. 
  27. ↑ "Starcloud, cette start-up veut mettre les data centers et les IA au frais, dans l’espace" (in fr). 2025-10-20. https://www.bfmtv.com/tech/starcloud-cette-start-up-veut-mettre-les-data-centers-et-les-ia-au-frais-dans-l-espace_AV-202510200041.html. 
  28. ↑ "‘Greetings, earthlings’: Nvidia-backed Starcloud trains first AI model in space as orbital data center race heats up" (in en). 2025-12-10. https://www.cnbc.com/2025/12/10/nvidia-backed-starcloud-trains-first-ai-model-in-space-orbital-data-centers.html. 
  29. ↑ "An AI Model Has Been Trained in Space Using an Orbiting Nvidia GPU" (in en). 2025-12-10. https://www.pcmag.com/news/an-ai-model-has-been-trained-in-space-using-an-orbiting-nvidia-gpu. 
  30. ↑ "‘One small step for LLMs’: Why training the first AI model in space is a breakthrough" (in en). 2025-12-13. https://indianexpress.com/article/technology/artificial-intelligence/why-training-first-ai-model-in-space-breakthrough-10415274/. 
  31. ↑ "StarCloud's Space AI Greets Earth with Witty Message" (in ko). 2025-12-13. https://www.chosun.com/english/industry-en/2025/12/14/7F4462FBTBASVJB32LO2UFAQXQ/. 
  32. ↑ "From data center spas to servers in space: How the energy crunch is reshaping cloud computing" (in en). 2025-12-29. https://www.cnbc.com/2025/12/29/future-of-the-cloud-from-spas-to-orbital-space-data-centers.html. 
  33. ↑ Kan, Michael (5 February 2026). "Startup Requests 88,000 Satellites". PCMag. https://www.pcmag.com/news/data-center-space-race-heats-up-as-starcloud-startup-requests-88000-satellites?test_uuid=04IpBmWGZleS0I0J3epvMrC&test_variant=B. 
  34. ↑ Kan, Michael (7 March 2026). "Starcloud to do bitcoin mining in space". PCMag. https://www.pcmag.com/news/startup-working-on-orbital-data-centers-teases-bitcoin-mining-in-space. 
  35. ↑ Rainbow, Jason (30 March 2026). "Starcloud achieves unicorn status with 170 million raise". SpaceNews. https://spacenews.com/starcloud-achieves-unicorn-status-with-170-million-raise-for-orbital-data-centers/. 
  36. ↑ Rainbow, Jason (26 May 2026). "Starcloud orders Starlink lasers for orbital data center network". SpaceNews. https://spacenews.com/starcloud-orders-starlink-lasers-for-orbital-data-center-network/. 
  37. ↑ Fernholtz, Timo (21 Aug 2026). "Starcloud raises $250M for orbital data centers". TechCrunch. https://techcrunch.com/2026/08/21/starcloud-raises-200-million-for-orbital-data-centers-as-launch-options-dry-up/. 
  38. ↑ "Starcloud Launches AI Satellite with NVIDIA H100 to Cut Energy Use" (in en). 2025-10-17. https://www.ibtimes.co.uk/starcloud-launches-ai-orbit-nvidia-powered-space-data-centers-promise-10x-energy-savings-1748534. 
  39. ↑ "Starcloud to Launch First H100 GPU Into Space This November". 15 October 2025. https://www.techbuzz.ai/articles/starcloud-to-launch-first-h100-gpu-into-space-this-november. 



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