Starcloud raises $170 million Series Ato build data centers in space

Starcloud’s latest backing circular values the abstraction compute institution astatine $1.1 billion, making it 1 of the fastest startups to scope unicorn presumption aft graduating from Y Combinator.

The company’s Series A, which closed 17 months aft its demo time presentation, was led by Benchmark and EQT Ventures. It’s different motion of the involvement successful outsourcing information centers to orbit arsenic assets and governmental obstacles dilatory their improvement connected Earth, but the concern exemplary depends connected unproven exertion and important superior expenditure.

Starcloud has present raised a full of $200 million, and launched its archetypal outer with an Nvidia H100 GPU successful November 2025. The institution volition motorboat a much almighty version, Starcloud 2, aboriginal this twelvemonth with aggregate GPUs, including an Nvidia Blackwell spot and an AWS server blade, arsenic good arsenic a bitcoin mining computer.

The institution volition besides statesman processing a information halfway spacecraft designed to motorboat from Starship, the reusable dense assistance rocket being built by Elon Musk’s SpaceX. Starcloud 3, arsenic the spacecraft is named, volition beryllium a 200 kilowatts, three-ton spacecraft that fits the “pez dispenser” strategy SpaceX designed to deploy its Starlink satellites from Starship.

CEO and laminitis Philip Johnston said helium expects that volition beryllium the archetypal orbital information halfway that is cost-competitive with terrestrial information centers, with costs connected the bid of $.05 per kw/hour of powerfulness — if commercialized motorboat costs onshore astir $500 per kilogram.

The situation is that Starship isn’t flying yet; Johnston says helium expects commercialized entree to unfastened up successful 2028 and 2029. That’s the world facing each the large abstraction information halfway projects: almighty abstraction computers volition beryllium cost-prohibitive until a caller procreation of rockets starts launching astatine a precocious operational cadence, thing that mightiness not hap until the 2030s.

“If it ends up being delayed, we’ll conscionable transportation connected launching the smaller versions connected Falcon 9,” Johnston said. “We’re not going to beryllium competitory connected vigor costs until Starship is flying frequently.”

“There’s benignant of 2 concern models,” Johnston explains: One is selling processing powerfulness to different spacecraft connected orbit; the company’s archetypal satellite, for example, analyzes information collected by Capella Space’s radar spacecraft. Then, successful the aboriginal erstwhile motorboat costs spell down, much almighty distributed information centers could perchance propulsion enactment from their terrestrial counterparts.

That gets astatine however caller this manufacture truly is. When Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang unveiled the company’s Vera Rubin Space-1 spot modules astatine his company’s yearly GPU Technology Conference past week, helium didn’t enactment that nary had been produced oregon shared with the company’s improvement partners. 

In fact, the fig of precocious GPUs connected orbit is numbered successful the dozens, portion Nvidia is estimated to person sold astir 4 cardinal to terrestrial hyperscalers successful 2025. 

Or see that SpaceX’s Starlink communications network, the largest outer web successful orbit with 10,000 spacecraft, produces thing astir 200 megawatts of energy, portion information centers with much than 25 gigawatts of powerfulness are presently nether operation successful the U..S, according to Cushman and Wakefield. 

Johnston argues that his institution is good up of the competition, with the archetypal terrestrial GPU deployed successful orbit. It was utilized to bid an AI exemplary successful orbit, a first, according to Starcloud, and tally a mentation of Gemini. Beyond the performance, Johnston says Starcloud present has invaluable information astir what it takes to tally a almighty spot successful space.

“An H100 is astir apt not the champion spot for space, to beryllium honest, but the crushed we did it is we wanted to beryllium that we could tally authorities of the creation terrestrial chips successful space,” helium told TechCrunch. That hard-won cognition —another GPU, an Nvidia A6000, failed during motorboat — volition power aboriginal designs.

There is simply a laundry database of method challenges to beryllium solved, including businesslike powerfulness procreation and cooling the hot-running chips. Starcloud-2 volition person the largest deployable radiator flown connected a backstage satellite; helium expects astatine slightest 2 further versions of that spacecraft volition caput to orbit, Johnston said.

Then determination is the situation of synchronization. The largest datacenter workloads, often for training, necessitate hundreds oregon thousands of GPUs to enactment successful tandem. Doing that successful abstraction volition either necessitate fantastically ample spacecraft, oregon almighty and reliable laser links betwixt spacecraft flying successful formation. Most companies moving connected this exertion expect those workloads to travel agelong aft simpler inference tasks instrumentality spot connected orbit.

Besides Starcloud, Aetherflux, Google’s Project Suncatcher, and Aethero — which launched Nvidia’s archetypal space-based Jetson GPU successful 2025 — are each processing abstraction information halfway businesses. 

The elephant successful the country is SpaceX itself, which has asked the U.S. authorities for support to physique and run a cardinal satellites for distributed compute successful space.

Going head-to-head with SpaceX is simply a daunting task for immoderate entrepreneur, but Johnston sees country for coexistence.

“They are gathering for a somewhat antithetic usage lawsuit than us,” helium told TechCrunch. “They’re chiefly readying connected serving Grok and Tesla workloads. It whitethorn beryllium astatine immoderate constituent that they connection a 3rd enactment unreality service, but what I deliberation they are improbable to bash is what we’re doing [as] an vigor and infrastructure player.”