Space-based computing startup Starcloud scored $170 million in a Series A round, reaching a valuation of $1.1 billion. The funding round was led by Benchmark, EQT Ventures and a number of new investors including Macquarie Capital, Seven Seven Six, Manhattan West, Adjacent, Carya, GSBackers, Link Ventures Harpoon New Vista Capital as well as Kevin Johnson.
The round also included participation from earlier investors NFX, Y Combinator, FUSE, Soma Capital, 3C AGI Partners and Nebular. Chetan Puttagunta, a partner at Benchmark, will now sit on the company’s board.
The new money will help the company develop its third satellite. They said their long-term objective is to make AI computing in space as cheap as operating it on Earth.
The notion arrives as AI systems consume vast amounts of energy. The push to run large models is straining power grids and raising costs for tech companies. Starcloud thinks it can relieve some of that pressure by transferring some of this work into space.
The company, which was founded in 2024 by Adi Oltean, Philip Johnston and Ezra Feilden, is working on a new approach for AI workloads. Rather than trying to compete directly with cloud providers, it is building an entirely new layer of computing in space.
Starcloud has previously sent Starcloud-1: its debut satellite. It claims to be the first company to take an NVIDIA H100 GPU into space. It also claims to have trained a large language model in orbit that could serve as an initial leap toward performing AI tasks in space.
Prior to this, the startup raised $21 million in seed funding in late 2024. It also participated in Y Combinator’s Summer 2024 batch and has gotten backing from the likes of In-Q-Tel, the NVIDIA Inception Program and the World Economic Forum’s Technology Pioneers programme.
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