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Starcloud

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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 March 2026, Starcloud became the fastest unicorn in Y Combinator history, hitting a $1.1bn valuation just 17 months after completing the program.[6]

History

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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][7] 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.[8]

In Summer 2024, the company released a white paper[9][10][11] 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.[12]

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.[13][14][15][16] 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.[17]

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.[18] The company described the mission as the first deployment of "data-center-class GPU compute" in orbit.[19][20][21][22]

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.[23][24][25]

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).[26][27][28][29][30]

Starcloud-1 deployment from a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket on November 2nd, 2025

On February 3, 2026, Starcloud submitted a proposal to the FCC for a constellation of up to 88,000 satellites for orbital data centers.[31]

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.[32]

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.[33]

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.[34]

Partnerships

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In 2024, Starcloud was selected as a member of the Nvidia Inception program, the Google Cloud Accelerator, and the Defense Innovation Unit Accelerator.[35][36]

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

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References

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  1. 1 2 Werner, John. "Lumen Orbit Wants To Put Data Centers In Space". Forbes. Archived from the original on 2025-01-09. Retrieved 2025-12-20.
  2. ↑ "The answer to tech's clean energy problem? Put data centres in space". www.thetimes.com. 2025-01-05. Retrieved 2025-12-20.
  3. ↑ "The plans to put data centres into orbit and on the moon". www.bbc.com. 2025-04-09. Retrieved 2025-12-20.
  4. ↑ "Space data centres: powering AI with solar energy". World Economic Forum. Archived from the original on 2025-07-10. Retrieved 2025-12-20.
  5. ↑ https://web.archive.org/web/20260202104016/https://www.starcloud.com/starcloud-2
  6. ↑ Rainbow, Jason (30 March 2026). "Starcloud achieves unicorn status with 170 million raise". SpaceNews.
  7. ↑ "Could data centres ever be built in orbit?". The Economist. ISSN 0013-0613. Retrieved 2025-12-30.
  8. ↑ Booth, Robert (2025-11-04). "Google plans to put datacentres in space to meet demand for AI". The Guardian. ISSN 0261-3077. Retrieved 2025-12-30.
  9. ↑ "Lumen Orbit wants to deploy data centers in space". Network World. Retrieved 2025-12-20.
  10. ↑ Monsanto, Brianna. "The future of data centers is above the clouds". IT Brew. Retrieved 2025-12-20.
  11. ↑ Feilden, Ezra; Oltean, Adi; Johnston, Philip (September 2024). "Why we should train AI in space" (PDF). Starcloud (formerly Lumen Orbit). Retrieved 20 December 2025.
  12. ↑ "Lumen Orbit Advances Space-Based AI Data Centers with $10M Funding and Nvidia Partnership". Space Insider. 2024-10-28. Retrieved 2025-12-20.
  13. ↑ "Lumen Orbit rebrands to Starcloud, raises another $10m for in-orbit data centers". www.datacenterdynamics.com. 2025-03-03. Retrieved 2025-12-20.
  14. ↑ "Lumen Orbit changes its name to Starcloud and raises $10M for space data centers". GeekWire. 2025-02-26. Retrieved 2025-12-20.
  15. ↑ Szkutak, Rebecca (2024-10-24). "Exclusive: Lumen Orbit closed one of the biggest rounds from Y Combinator's last cohort". TechCrunch. Retrieved 2025-12-20.
  16. ↑ Eaton, Kit (2024-10-25). "Here's How a Startup Landed $10 Million to Put AI Data Centers in Space". Inc. Retrieved 2025-12-20.
  17. ↑ Szkutak, Rebecca (2024-12-11). "200 VCs wanted to get into Lumen Orbit's $11M seed round". TechCrunch. Retrieved 2025-12-20.
  18. ↑ Tan, Eli (2026-01-01). "Even the Sky May Not Be the Limit for A.I. Data Centers". New York Times. Retrieved 2026-01-01.
  19. ↑ "Nvidia-backed start up Starcloud sends AI-equipped satellite to space". NBC News. Retrieved 2025-12-20.
  20. ↑ "Starcloud-1 with NVIDIA GPU takes AI to space in November because the world is not enough". FE Tech Bytes. 2025-10-28. Retrieved 2025-12-20.
  21. ↑ say, Sebastian Moss Have your (2025-11-03). "Starcloud-1 satellite reaches space, with Nvidia H100 GPU now operating in orbit". www.datacenterdynamics.com. Retrieved 2025-12-20.
  22. ↑ "SpaceX". SpaceX. Retrieved 2025-12-20.
  23. ↑ Kurt Knutsson, CyberGuy Report (2025-10-31). "A supercomputer chip going to space could change life on Earth". Fox News. Retrieved 2025-12-20.
  24. ↑ Fork’, ‘HARD (2025-11-26). "Video: How Will Starcloud Build Data Centers in Space?". The New York Times. ISSN 0362-4331. Retrieved 2025-12-20.
  25. ↑ "Starcloud, cette start-up veut mettre les data centers et les IA au frais, dans l'espace". BFM (in French). 2025-10-20. Retrieved 2025-12-20.
  26. ↑ "'Greetings, earthlings': Nvidia-backed Starcloud trains first AI model in space as orbital data center race heats up". CNBC. 2025-12-10. Retrieved 2025-12-20.
  27. ↑ "An AI Model Has Been Trained in Space Using an Orbiting Nvidia GPU". PCMAG. 2025-12-10. Retrieved 2025-12-20.
  28. ↑ "'One small step for LLMs': Why training the first AI model in space is a breakthrough". The Indian Express. 2025-12-13. Retrieved 2025-12-20.
  29. ↑ "StarCloud's Space AI Greets Earth with Witty Message". The Chosun Daily (in Korean). 2025-12-13. Retrieved 2025-12-20.
  30. ↑ "From data center spas to servers in space: How the energy crunch is reshaping cloud computing". CNBC. 2025-12-29. Retrieved 2025-12-29.
  31. ↑ Kan, Michael (5 February 2026). "Startup Requests 88,000 Satellites". PCMag.
  32. ↑ Kan, Michael (7 March 2026). "Starcloud to do bitcoin mining in space". PCMag.
  33. ↑ Rainbow, Jason (30 March 2026). "Starcloud achieves unicorn status with 170 million raise". SpaceNews.
  34. ↑ Rainbow, Jason (26 May 2026). "Starcloud orders Starlink lasers for orbital data center network". SpaceNews.
  35. ↑ "Starcloud Launches AI Satellite with NVIDIA H100 to Cut Energy Use". International Business Times UK. 2025-10-17. Retrieved 2025-12-20.
  36. ↑ "Starcloud to Launch First H100 GPU Into Space This November". The Tech Buzz. 15 October 2025. Retrieved 20 December 2025.
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