The new capital will be used for the next generation of Starcloud-3 satellites, the establishment of a dedicated manufacturing facility, major expansion and procurement of future launch contracts.
Space tech infrastructure startup Starcloud has achieved ‘unicorn’ status after raising $170m in Series A funding, valued at $1.1bn, to build its space-based data centres.
The new capital will be used for the design and construction of the next-generation Starcloud-3 satellites, the establishment of a dedicated manufacturing facility, key value expansion and procurement of future launch contracts, it said.
Starcloud, based in the US state of Washington and founded in 2024, builds data centers in the earth’s low orbit to work around the limits and limitations of ground-based centers, and feed the computing power and the power of the AI boom through the use of solar energy.
“The AI revolution is at odds with the physical limits of our terrestrial energy grid. We are rapidly running out of space to build new energy projects in data centers on Earth,” said Philip Johnston, Starcloud CEO and co-founder.
“By moving AI compute into space, we are opening up access to unlimited solar energy and completely removing the energy bottleneck. This funding allows us to quickly scale our orbital infrastructure and meet the huge commercial demand for sustainable AI computing.”
Starcloud-1, the company’s first satellite, was launched last November and featured the most powerful GPU in space, the Nvidia H100, as well as demonstrating AI model training and operations from space, according to the startup.
Starcloud-2 is scheduled for launch in 2026, will produce 100 times the power of its predecessor, and will be the company’s first satellite to use the commercial edge and cloud service of customers and partners such as Crusoe, AWS, Google Cloud and Nvidia, according to Starcloud.
The latest funding is split into two phases, with the first round led by Benchmark with participation from EQT, and an expansion round led by both investors.
There was also participation from Macquarie Capital, NFX, Nebular, Y Combinator, Adjacent, 776 Ventures, Fuse Ventures, Manhattan West and Monolith Power Systems.
Angel investors include Gen. Stephen Wilson, former Boeing CEO Dennis Muilenburg, and former Starbucks CEO and Goldman Sachs board member Kevin Johnson.
As part of the financing, Benchmark general partner Chetan Puttagunta will join Starcloud’s board.
He said: “We believe we are at the beginning of a decades-long AI infrastructure build. Starcloud is pioneering a solution to the challenges of scaling AI infrastructure on Earth with orbital data centers.”
Irish investor Finn Murphy of Nebular was an early backer of Starcloud, which was founded by Johnston, CTO Ezra Feilden and chief engineer Adi Oltean.
Other companies are sending data centers into space as well. Elon Musk’s SpaceX uses its Starship rockets for this purpose, and Musk previously said, “In the long term, space-based AI is the only way to scale.”
Meanwhile, Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin is also participating in the emerging competition for satellite Internet service.
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