Starcloud raised $170 million in a Series A that values the space compute company at $1.1 billion and brings total funding to $200 million, the company reported.
The funding, led by Benchmark and EQT Ventures and closing 17 months after the startup’s Y Combinator demo day, arrives as firms explore moving data-centre workloads off Earth amid terrestrial resource and political constraints.
Starcloud has already launched a satellite carrying an Nvidia H100 GPU and says it trained an artificial intelligence model in orbit and ran a version of Gemini.
The company plans a more powerful Starcloud 2 later this year with multiple GPUs, an Nvidia Blackwell chip, an AWS server blade and a bitcoin mining computer.
It is also designing a data-centre spacecraft, Starcloud 3, sized at 200 kilowatts and three tons to fit SpaceX’s “pez dispenser” deployment system on Starship. CEO Philip Johnston said, “If it ends up being delayed, we’ll just carry on launching the smaller versions on Falcon 9.”
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Johnston frames Starcloud’s path to competitiveness around lower launch costs and scale, projecting energy costs on the order of $0.05 per kW/hour if commercial launches reach about $500 per kilogram.
He added a technical rationale for early hardware choices: “An H100 is probably not the best chip for space, to be honest, but the reason we did it is we wanted to prove that we could run state-of-the-art terrestrial chips in space,” he told TechCrunch. The company also reported a failed A6000 GPU during launch and says those lessons will shape future designs.
The recap
- Raised $170 million Series A led by Benchmark and EQT Ventures
- Company valuation reaches $1.1 billion; total funding now $200 million
- Will launch Starcloud 2 later this year; developing Starcloud 3
