Starcloud, a startup developing satellites that can perform AI inference in orbit, has added a $250 million extension to its March $170 million Series A funding round, according to a TechCrunch report. The extension values the company at $2.3 billion.
The report also mentioned that the additional capital will be used for opening a larger manufacturing facility, and advancing its largest orbital data center spacecraft, Starcloud-3, which is meant to fly on SpaceX’s forthcoming Starship rocket. CEO Philip Johnston also has plans to ensure that he can launch his satellites as the market for rocket transportation tightens up, by raising funds.
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“We can see what’s coming — we’re going to need to book an enormous amount of launch,” Johnston told TechCrunch.
“As soon as we can, we want to get under contract with things like Starship,” Johnston said. “One of the biggest costs is now on securing your launch capacity…launch is pretty constrained right now because [SpaceX’s] Falcon 9 program is scheduled to end in 2028.”
Back in March, Starcloud attained unicorn status after it raised $170 million at a $1.1 billion valuation in a funding round led by Benchmark and EQT Ventures.
The funding extension was led by Manhattan West Ventures and included participation from Nvidia and Cisco. Other participants included Benchmark, EQT, Soma, NFX, 776, Cedar Capital, Goanna Capital, and Standard Capital.
Johnston had pointed to the Nvidia investment as an indication of Starcloud’s advantages in the nascent space compute sector. Starcloud is currently the only known company currently operating a Nvidia H100 terrestrial data center GPU in orbit, and the first to train a model using it. Most other space GPUs are designed for edge processing. Starcloud is sharing those learnings with Nvidia as the chipmaker develops its first purpose-built GPU for space, the Vera Rubin Space-1 chip.
“The reason they’ve chosen to do this investment now is because of all of this data that we got from Starcloud One,” Johnston told TechCrunch. “They, more than any other VC, did way more technical duty on this than anybody else.”
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Starcloud hopes to fly the space-ready chip–which is yet to be built–into orbit by late 2028. Johnston says his engineers are tracking a few key design choices: the relationship between the running temperature of the chip and the size of the radiators that dispel that heat, the placement of radiation shielding, and the ruggedizing required for the chips to survive the violence of a rocket launch.
Starcloud currently has 25 employees, and is developing production lines at a 100,000-square-foot-facility in Woodinville, Washington, near where Amazon and SpaceX build satellites for their communication networks.