Starcloud (formerly Lumen Orbit), a Seattle-area aerospace startup that wants to build data centers in space has raised US$ 170 million in a Series A round, giving the startup a US$ 1.1 billion valuation and making it the fastest company to reach unicorn status after a Y Combinator demo day by raising US$ 200 million in total.
According to a press release, the round was led by Benchmark and EQT. As part of the investment, Benchmark partner Chetan Puttagunta will join Starcloud’s board. The funding comes as the rapid growth of artificial intelligence is putting pressure on power grids and slowing the construction of new data centers on Earth. Starcloud plans to avoid those limits by moving computing into low Earth orbit where satellites can draw on solar power.
Philip Johnston, Co-Founder and CEO, Starcloud, said, “The AI revolution is colliding with the physical limits of our terrestrial energy grid. We are quickly running out of places to build new energy projects for data centers on Earth. By moving AI compute to space, we unlock access to unlimited solar power and completely remove the energy bottleneck.”
Chetan Puttagunta, General Partner and six-time Midas lister, said, “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.”
Starcloud plans to launch Starcloud-2 later this year, the second satellite will generate 100 times more power than its predecessor and carry the largest commercial deployable radiator ever sent into space. The satellite is expected to run commercial workloads for customers including Crusoe, with support from partners including Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud and NVIDIA.
The new funding will also be used to build Starcloud-3 satellites, open a manufacturing facility, hire more staff and secure future launch contracts.
With US$ 3 million in pre-seed funding, Starcloud designed, built and launched its first satellite, Starcloud-1, within 21 months. After the satellite launched in November 2025 it had placed an NVIDIA H100 graphics processor in orbit for the first time. Starcloud has also the mission trained an AI model in space, ran a version of Google’s Gemini model and demonstrated model fine-tuning in orbit.