Starcloud
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Investors
Founders
About
Starcloud (formerly Lumen Orbit) is a Redmond, Washington-based startup building orbital data centers to provide GPU computing resources for AI workloads in space 12. Founded in 2024 by Philip Johnston, Ezra Feilden, and Adi Oltean, the company graduated from Y Combinator’s Summer 2024 batch 3. Johnston is a second-time founder who previously worked at McKinsey on satellite projects for national space agencies; he holds an MPA from Harvard, an MBA from Wharton, and an MA in Applied Mathematics from Columbia 34. Feilden has a decade of satellite design experience at Airbus Defense & Space and Oxford Space Systems, with a PhD in Materials Engineering from Imperial College London 3. Oltean was a Principal Software Engineer at SpaceX on the Starlink team and spent 20 years at Microsoft on GPU clusters, holding 25+ patents 3.
The company’s thesis is that falling launch costs make it viable to deploy data centers in orbit, where near-continuous solar power and passive radiative cooling eliminate two of the biggest constraints on terrestrial AI infrastructure 12. Starcloud’s long-term plan calls for an 88,000-satellite data center constellation 5. The company projects that space-based data centers could achieve cost-competitiveness with terrestrial facilities by 2028-2029 5. Partners include Nvidia, Amazon Web Services, and Google Cloud 5.
In November 2025, Starcloud launched Starcloud-1 aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9, carrying the first data-center-class GPU (Nvidia H100) to orbit 24. The satellite demonstrated AI training and inference in space, running Google’s Gemma open-source model and conducting the first orbital nanoGPT training 46. The next launch, Starcloud-2, is scheduled for late 2026 and will feature 100x more power generation capacity, an Nvidia Blackwell B200 chip, and AWS Outposts hardware 25.
On March 30, 2026, the company announced a $170M Series A at a $1.1B valuation, making it the fastest startup in Y Combinator history to reach unicorn status — 17 months after demo day 257. The company had 12-13 employees at the time of announcement and planned to grow to 50 by year-end 37.
Funding History
| Date | Round | Amount | Lead | Co-investors |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2024 | Pre-Seed | $2.4M | — | — 8 |
| 2024-12 | Seed | $11M | NFX | Y Combinator, FUSE, Soma Capital, Andreessen Horowitz (scout), Sequoia Capital (scout) 8 |
| 2025-02 | Seed Extension | $10M | — | Nvidia, others 89 |
| 2025 | Undisclosed | — | In-Q-Tel | — 59 |
| 2026-03-30 | Series A | $170M | Benchmark, EQT Ventures | Macquarie Capital, NFX, Nebular, Y Combinator, Adjacent, 776 Ventures, Fuse Ventures, Manhattan West, Monolith Power Systems 27 |
Total raised: $200M 25. Valuation: $1.1B (post-money, as of Series A) 25.
Notable angel investors in the Series A include General Stephen Wilson (former Air Force vice-chief of staff), Dennis Muilenburg (former Boeing CEO), and Kevin Johnson (former Starbucks CEO) 7.
The seed rounds combined to approximately $21M, described by the company as one of the highest-ever seed rounds for a YC company 8.
What Investors Say
Benchmark General Partner Chetan Puttagunta: “We believe that we are in the early innings of a decades-long buildout of AI infrastructure. Starcloud is pioneering a solution to the challenges of scaling AI infrastructure on Earth with orbital data centers. Their extraordinary engineering team has achieved significant technical breakthroughs in power and cooling, as well as innovative advancements in manufacturing processes. Most notably, the great team at Starcloud has reached these milestones while remaining exceptionally capital efficient.” 10
What Founders Say
Philip Johnston (CEO): “In 10 years, nearly all new data centers will be being built in outer space.” 4
Philip Johnston on the Series A: “At the current price, we could’ve easily taken three times the amount of capital. Because if you want exposure to this, which everybody does, who else are you going to back? I mean, you can’t back Google, you can’t back Amazon, and we’re like a mile ahead of any other startup.” 7
Philip Johnston on technology choices: “An H100 is probably not the best chip for space… we wanted to prove that we could run state of the art terrestrial chips in space.” 6
Philip Johnston on the seed funding: “The $21 million in fresh funding allows us to accelerate our plans to build large data centers in space, and means that we are funded through at least the next two launches.” 8
Philip Johnston on manufacturing: “We have to build it in-house because the cost equation is brutal.” 8
Philip Johnston on commercial plans: “The main customer contracts that are committed are for other spacecraft, particularly Earth Observation and DOW satellites. We are also working on some binding energy offtake agreements with the hyperscalers to be announced in the coming months.” 5
Sources
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Starcloud website, “Data Centers in Space,” accessed March 2026. https://www.starcloud.com/↩↩
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TechCrunch, “Starcloud raises $170 million Series A to build data centers in space,” Tim Fernholz, March 30, 2026. https://techcrunch.com/2026/03/30/starcloud-raises-170-million-series-ato-build-data-centers-in-space/↩↩↩↩↩↩↩↩
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Y Combinator, “Starcloud” company profile, accessed March 2026. https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/starcloud↩↩↩↩↩
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NVIDIA Blog, “How Starcloud Is Bringing Data Centers to Outer Space,” accessed March 2026. https://blogs.nvidia.com/blog/starcloud/↩↩↩↩
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BNN Bloomberg, “Starcloud reaches US$1.1 billion valuation as AI space race heats up,” March 30, 2026. https://www.bnnbloomberg.ca/business/2026/03/30/starcloud-reaches-us11-billion-valuation-as-ai-space-race-heats-up/↩↩↩↩↩↩↩↩↩
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TAMradar, “Starcloud Raises $170M Series A for Orbital AI Compute,” accessed March 2026. https://www.tamradar.com/funding-rounds/starcloud-series-a-170m↩↩
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Payload Space, “Starcloud Raises $170M Series A at $1.1B Valuation,” March 2026. https://payloadspace.com/starcloud-raises-170m-series-a-at-1-1b-valuation/↩↩↩↩↩
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GeekWire, “Lumen Orbit changes its name to Starcloud and raises $10M for space data centers,” 2025. https://www.geekwire.com/2025/lumen-orbit-starcloud-10m-space-data-centers/↩↩↩↩↩↩
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CNBC, “Nvidia-backed Starcloud trains first AI model in space, orbital data centers,” December 10, 2025. https://www.cnbc.com/2025/12/10/nvidia-backed-starcloud-trains-first-ai-model-in-space-orbital-data-centers.html↩↩
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BusinessWire, “Starcloud Raises $170M Series A at $1.1bn Valuation Led by Benchmark and EQT Ventures,” March 30, 2026. https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20260330024111/en/Starcloud-Raises-%24170M-Series-A-at-%241.1bn-Valuation-Led-by-Benchmark-and-EQT-Ventures↩