Starcloud’s newest funding spherical values the area compute firm at $1.1 billion, making it one of many quickest startups to achieve unicorn standing after graduating from Y Combinator.
The corporate’s Sequence A, which closed 17 months after its demo day presentation, was led by Benchmark and EQT Ventures. It’s one other signal of the curiosity in outsourcing knowledge facilities to orbit as useful resource and political obstacles sluggish their improvement on Earth, however the enterprise mannequin relies on unproven expertise and important capital expenditure.
Starcloud has now raised a complete of $200 million, and launched its first satellite tv for pc with an Nvidia H100 GPU in November 2025. The corporate will launch a extra highly effective model, Starcloud 2, later this yr with a number of GPUs, together with an Nvidia Blackwell chip and an AWS server blade, in addition to a bitcoin mining pc.
The corporate may even start creating a knowledge heart spacecraft designed to launch from Starship, the reusable heavy raise rocket being constructed by Elon Musk’s SpaceX. Starcloud 3, because the spacecraft is known as, shall be a 200 kilowatts, three-ton spacecraft that matches the “pez dispenser” system SpaceX designed to deploy its Starlink satellites from Starship.
CEO and founder Philip Johnston mentioned he expects that would be the first orbital knowledge heart that’s cost-competitive with terrestrial knowledge facilities, with prices on the order of $.05 per kw/hour of energy — if industrial launch prices land round $500 per kilogram.
The problem is that Starship isn’t flying but; Johnston says he expects industrial entry to open up in 2028 and 2029. That’s the fact dealing with all the large area knowledge heart tasks: highly effective area computer systems shall be cost-prohibitive till a brand new era of rockets begins launching at a excessive operational cadence, one thing that may not occur till the 2030s.
“If it finally ends up being delayed, we’ll simply stick with it launching the smaller variations on Falcon 9,” Johnston mentioned. “We’re not going to be aggressive on vitality prices till Starship is flying often.”
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“There’s form of two enterprise fashions,” Johnston explains: One is promoting processing energy to different spacecraft on orbit; the corporate’s first satellite tv for pc, for instance, analyzes knowledge collected by Capella House’s radar spacecraft. Then, sooner or later when launch prices go down, extra highly effective distributed knowledge facilities might probably pull work from their terrestrial counterparts.
That will get at how new this trade actually is. When Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang unveiled the corporate’s Vera Rubin House-1 chip modules at his firm’s annual GPU Expertise Convention final week, he didn’t notice that none had been produced or shared with the corporate’s improvement companions.
In reality, the variety of superior GPUs on orbit is numbered within the dozens, whereas Nvidia is estimated to have bought almost 4 million to terrestrial hyperscalers in 2025.
Or think about that SpaceX’s Starlink communications community, the most important satellite tv for pc community in orbit with 10,000 spacecraft, produces one thing round 200 megawatts of vitality, whereas knowledge facilities with greater than 25 gigawatts of energy are presently underneath building within the U..S, in accordance with Cushman and Wakefield.
Johnston argues that his firm is nicely forward of the competitors, with the primary terrestrial GPU deployed in orbit. It was used to coach an AI mannequin in orbit, a primary, in accordance with Starcloud, and run a model of Gemini. Past the efficiency, Johnston says Starcloud now has precious knowledge about what it takes to run a robust chip in area.
“An H100 might be not the perfect chip for area, to be sincere, however the purpose we did it’s we needed to show that we might run cutting-edge terrestrial chips in area,” he informed TechCrunch. That arduous-won information —one other GPU, an Nvidia A6000, failed throughout launch — will affect future designs.
There’s a laundry checklist of technical challenges to be solved, together with environment friendly energy era and cooling the hot-running chips. Starcloud-2 can have the most important deployable radiator flown on a personal satellite tv for pc; he expects a minimum of two extra variations of that spacecraft will head to orbit, Johnston mentioned.
Then there may be the problem of synchronization. The biggest datacenter workloads, usually for coaching, require lots of or hundreds of GPUs to work in tandem. Doing that in area will both require fantastically massive spacecraft, or highly effective and dependable laser hyperlinks between spacecraft flying in formation. Most firms engaged on this expertise count on these workloads to return lengthy after easier inference duties happen on orbit.
Moreover Starcloud, Aetherflux, Google’s Mission Suncatcher, and Aethero — which launched Nvidia’s first space-based Jetson GPU in 2025 — are all creating area knowledge heart companies.
The elephant within the room is SpaceX itself, which has requested the U.S. authorities for permission to construct and function one million satellites for distributed compute in area.
Going head-to-head with SpaceX is a frightening activity for any entrepreneur, however Johnston sees room for coexistence.
“They’re constructing for a barely totally different use case than us,” he informed TechCrunch. “They’re primarily planning on serving Grok and Tesla workloads. It could be in some unspecified time in the future that they provide a 3rd occasion cloud service, however what I believe they’re unlikely to do is what we’re doing [as] an vitality and infrastructure participant.”
