Starcloud, a startup developing satellites capable of performing AI inference in orbit, told TechCrunch that it has added a $250 million extension to its $170 million Series A funding round in March. The extension values the company at $2.3 billion.
The additional capital will enable the company to open a larger manufacturing facility and power its largest orbital data center spacecraft, Starcloud-3, intended to fly on SpaceX’s next Starship rocket. CEO Philip Johnston is also raising capital to ensure the company can launch satellites amid a tight rocket delivery market.
“We know what’s going to happen. We’re going to have to book a huge amount of launches,” Johnston told TechCrunch. StarCloud has already applied to the FCC for permission to operate a fleet of 88,000 spacecraft.
“We hope to sign with Starship and others as soon as possible,” Johnston said. “One of the biggest costs is securing launch capacity.[SpaceX’s]Falcon 9 program is scheduled to end in 2028, so launches are pretty limited right now.”
Launch costs are already one of the biggest challenges for orbital data center startups, so much so that one startup has decided to build its own rocket.
SpaceX now plans to phase out its workhorse vehicle and put its much larger but still unproven Starship rocket into service, making the plan even more difficult for satellite operators. That’s especially true as competing rockets like Blue Origin’s New Glenn and ULA’s Vulcan aren’t flying regularly, and newer rockets like Rocket Lab’s Neutron have yet to fly.
Currently, StarCloud is focused on launching two of its new generation 8 kW computing satellites (called StarCloud 2) on rideshare flights in 2027. They perform trajectory inference tasks for customers including U.S. government agencies. StarCloud is also considering purchasing a dedicated Falcon 9 launch vehicle to launch more spacecraft and contracting with other providers to support future missions.
Still, StarCloud is ultimately built around SpaceX’s Starship’s potential to reduce launch costs enough to build an orbital inference layer that can compete with ground-based data centers. Johnston said he remains confident in SpaceX’s ability to demonstrate that the world’s most powerful rocket can be reused quickly and frequently.
SpaceX CEO Elon Musk announced this week that the company would delay its attempt to capture the returning Starship rocket by several months and attempt to fly it again for the first time in late 2020 or early 2027.
“Obviously if we can’t book SpaceX launch capacity in 2029, that’s going to be difficult for us,” Johnston said.
Starcloud’s funding extension was led by Manhattan West Ventures and included participation from Nvidia and Cisco. NVIDIA has raised $25 million to back Starcloud, according to people familiar with the deal. Other participants include Benchmark, EQT, Soma, NFX, 776, Cedar Capital, Goanna Capital and Standard Capital.
Johnston cited the Nvidia investment as a key sign of StarCloud’s dominance in the emerging field of space computing. Starcloud is the only company (to our knowledge) currently operating Nvidia H100 ground data center GPUs in orbit, and the first to train models using them. Most other space GPUs are designed for edge processing. Starcloud is sharing these lessons with Nvidia as the chipmaker develops its Vera Rubin Space-1 chip, the first space-specific GPU.
“The reason they chose to make this investment now is because of all this data they’re getting from Starcloud One,” he told TechCrunch. “They performed far more technical duties on this than anyone else, more than any other VC.”
The space-ready chip has not yet been manufactured, but StarCloud hopes to have it in orbit in late 2028. Johnston said engineers are considering several important design choices. The relationship between the chip’s operating temperature and the size of the radiator that dissipates that heat, the placement of radiation shields, and the durability required for the chip to withstand the brunt of a rocket launch.
The company, which currently has 25 employees and continues to grow, is developing a production line in a 100,000-square-foot facility in Woodinville, Washington, near where SpaceX and Amazon are building satellites for communications networks.
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