Lumen Orbit

Starcloud, Inc., founded as Lumen Orbit, designs, builds and operates data centers deployed in space. The company's thesis is that as launch costs decline, orbital compute can exploit continuous solar illumination and radiative cooling to scale toward gigawatt capacity while avoiding terrestrial permitting and power constraints. Its architecture is based on compute pods that can be launched individually and clustered around large deployable solar arrays, with high-bandwidth optical laser links used to move data to and from Earth. The company has published a white paper ("Why we should train AI in space") setting out the case for training AI models in orbit and the architectures it expects to be used, and has described renders and statements concerning a potential 5GW deployment, which it says would require roughly 4 square kilometres of solar array.

The initial product concept was an in-orbit edge-processing constellation: other satellites would transmit raw data to Starcloud's spacecraft, where onboard GPUs would run customer-selected AI models and only the extracted insights would be downlinked, reducing bandwidth, cost and latency. An early plan described a 300-satellite constellation in very low Earth orbit flying beneath customer spacecraft to act as an "in-orbit ground station" providing near-real-time downlink. Alongside this, the company positions orbital capacity for large-scale AI training clusters, arguing that launch and solar costs compare favourably with terrestrial electricity spend.

Demonstration missions have progressed from a 60 kg (132 lb) Lumen-1/Starcloud-1 satellite built on Astro Digital's Corvus-Micro bus, carrying data-center-grade Nvidia GPUs into a 325 km low Earth orbit with an expected 11-month mission life, through to a proposed constellation of up to 88,000 satellites filed with the FCC in February 2026 and a planned Starcloud-2 mission that the company says will fly bitcoin-mining ASICs.

Founding story

Johnston, a former McKinsey consultant who worked on satellite projects for national space agencies and previously co-founded the e-commerce venture Opontia, and Feilden, a satellite designer from Airbus Defence and Space and Oxford Space Systems, were childhood friends who initially considered space-based solar power but concluded that transmitting energy back to Earth was impractical. They pivoted to orbital data centers, which consume solar energy in place and benefit from the cold of space for cooling. They were then introduced to Adi Oltean, a SpaceX Starlink engineer who had been independently exploring the same idea; he joined as co-founder and chief engineer about a month after the company started.

Business model

The company builds and operates its own satellites carrying GPU compute and sells access to that in-orbit capacity and processing to third parties, including satellite operators wanting onboard analysis of their data and AI companies needing training and inference capacity. A partnership with Crusoe is intended to host Crusoe's cloud platform on a Starcloud satellite planned for late 2026, with GPU capacity from orbit expected to be offered commercially from early 2027. The website also invites suppliers and customers to make contact directly.

Sale of in-orbit compute capacity and data-processing services; under the Crusoe agreement, orbital GPU capacity is expected to be commercially offered from early 2027.

Traction

Graduated from Y Combinator's Summer 2024 batch, where it raised one of the largest seed rounds at demo day; TechCrunch reported more than 200 VCs approached the company. Launched the Starcloud-1 demonstrator on a SpaceX Falcon 9 on 2 November 2025 with an Nvidia H100, ran Google DeepMind's Gemma model and trained nanoGPT in orbit in December 2025, filed an FCC proposal for up to 88,000 satellites in February 2026, and reported a $2.3bn valuation following an August 2026 raise. Employee count was listed as 15 in 2026.

Latest developments

In August 2026 the company announced a $250M raise at a $2.3bn valuation, described by one outlet as an extension of the March 2026 $170M Series A, with Nvidia investing $25M and Cisco and Benchmark participating. Earlier in 2026 it filed an FCC proposal for a constellation of up to 88,000 satellites (February), announced plans to mine bitcoin in space using ASICs on Starcloud-2 (March), and signed a contract with SpaceX to integrate Starlink mini-lasers onto its next 25 satellites (May).