Starcloud

Philip Johnston, Ezra Feilden and Adi Oltean founded the company in January 2024 as Lumen Orbit, initially in El Segundo before relocating to the Seattle-area space/cloud cluster in Redmond. Johnston brought satellite consulting and startup/finance experience; Feilden had a decade designing satellite structures and deployable solar arrays at Airbus/SSTL and Oxford Space Systems; Oltean had led Starlink-to-spacecraft tracking-beam software at SpaceX after two decades engineering Microsoft's large GPU systems. The founders argued that launch-cost declines could make orbit attractive for AI compute: near-continuous solar generation without batteries, no terrestrial grid/land/water permit constraint, and radiator-based heat rejection. The first near-term market is edge processing for Earth-observation and other spacecraft, which avoids downlinking raw data; later stages would uplink terrestrial workloads, address data-sovereignty/security cases and ultimately compete with Earth data centers. The company completed YC S24, raised a $2.4m pre-seed, an $11m NFX-led seed at a $40m valuation and a $10m SAFE extension, then added unitemized strategic capital including In-Q-Tel. It changed its name to Starcloud in February 2025 after Lumen Technologies asserted rights in 'Lumen' for data centers. Starcloud-1, a roughly 60kg satellite launched on SpaceX Bandwagon-4 on November 2, 2025, carried a liquid-cooled NVIDIA H100, solar array, radiative thermal system and software error mitigation. In December it ran Google's Gemma and trained/inferenced a small NanoGPT model on Shakespeare—the first publicly reported in-orbit LLM training. This is a meaningful flight demonstration, not a hyperscale data center. In March 2026 Starcloud filed an FCC application for as many as 88,000 satellites and raised a $170m Series A at a $1.1b valuation. Benchmark led the initial tranche; Benchmark and EQT Ventures co-led the extension, with Macquarie-administered funds, NFX, Nebular, YC, Adjacent, Seven Seven Six, Fuse, Manhattan West, Monolith Power Systems and angels. Public sources round cumulative funding to $200m, although separately disclosed rounds total $193.4m and reporting conflicts on whether pre-Series A capital was $30m or $34m. Starcloud-2 is planned for October 2026 with 100x Starcloud-1's power, a large deployable radiator, NVIDIA Blackwell B200, AWS Outposts/server hardware and bitcoin-mining ASICs, running workloads for partners including Crusoe, AWS, Google Cloud and NVIDIA. Starcloud-3 is intended for Starship-class deployment around 2028 and scale-up manufacturing. The commercial thesis depends heavily on Starship or equivalent launch economics for terrestrial workloads; current Falcon 9 costs support only narrower in-space processing. Large-scale risks include launch slips/failures, radiation, thermal rejection, communications bandwidth/latency, hardware obsolescence and repair, collision/debris and deorbit performance, spectrum and environmental approval, rocket/re-entry emissions, light pollution, manufacturing capital intensity and competition from SpaceX, Blue Origin, Google Project Suncatcher, Axiom, Aetherflux and other orbital-compute projects.

Founding story

The founders combined a finance/space-strategy thesis with practical experience in satellite solar structures, Starlink links and Azure-scale GPU systems. They incorporated in January 2024, moved to Redmond for aerospace/cloud talent and published an orbital-data-center white paper during YC S24.

Business model

Owns/deploys orbital compute spacecraft and sells edge/hyperscale compute, hosting and potentially energy/compute capacity under long-term contracts.

Prospective reserved compute, satellite edge-processing and cloud/energy offtake contracts; no public price card and no verified material commercial revenue disclosed.

Traction

Starcloud-1 successfully reached orbit in November 2025 and ran Gemma plus trained/inferenced NanoGPT in December. Company reported committed contracts for processing data from other spacecraft, with identities/amounts undisclosed. Partner workload plans include Crusoe, AWS, Google Cloud and NVIDIA. Team was 13 in March 2026.

Latest developments

Raised $170m at $1.1b on March 30, 2026 and grew manufacturing plans. FCC review of the 88,000-satellite system is pending. Starcloud-2 is scheduled for October 2026 with NVIDIA Blackwell, AWS server hardware, bitcoin ASICs and partner/customer workloads; no launch or commercial completion should be inferred as of August 17.