Starcloud completes $170 million Series A funding to build data centers in space

Space computing startup Starcloud reached a valuation of $1.1 billion after raising a Series A round led by Benchmark and EQT Ventures, becoming one of the fastest companies to graduate into a unicorn status within the Y Combinator accelerator. The company has raised $200 million in total funding and plans to launch its first satellite equipped with an Nvidia H100 GPU by the end of 2025, with plans to roll out more powerful models afterward. CEO Philip Johnston said that competitiveness on the cost side against ground data centers depends on whether SpaceX’s Starship can lower launch costs, a milestone expected to happen only toward the end of the 2020s. Although technical challenges like cooling and synchronization still remain, Starcloud’s goal is to lead the development of orbital data centers, alongside other emerging companies such as Aetherflux and Google’s Project Suncatcher, to secure a place in this nascent industry.