Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs
An artist’s conception shows data-center spacecraft being added to an orbital array. (Starcloud via YouTube)
Redmond, Wash.-based Starcloud got its start just last year under a different name — Lumen Orbit — but the newly renamed company is already filling out its seed funding round with $10 million in fresh investment for space-based data centers.
The new influx of capital comes after December’s announcement that the startup brought in $11 million from investors including NFX, Y Combinator (or YC, for short), FUSE, Soma Capital and scout funds from Andreessen Horowitz and Sequoia. Starcloud graduated from Y Combinator’s summer cohort last year.
The additional funding comes from previous seed investors and several new venture capital firms in the form of a simplified agreement for future equity, or SAFE. If you add up the $11 million and the $10 million, “it can be thought of as a $21M seed, which is one of the highest-ever seed rounds for a company coming out of YC,” Philip Johnston, Starcloud’s CEO and one of its founders, told GeekWire in an email.
Johnston said Starcloud doesn’t intend to identify the new investors until a Series A funding round takes place.
Starcloud’s big idea is to place a network of megawatt-scale computer servers in Earth orbit, powered by grids of solar panels that could stretch as much as 2.5 miles (4 kilometers) in width.
Such space-based facilities would offer alternatives to terrestrial data centers that are taking up increasing amounts of territory, gobbling up increasing amounts of electrical power, and stirring up increasing levels of controversy.
Space-based data centers could play a key role in processing the massive amounts of imagery and other data provided by Earth observation satellites. Doing the computational heavy lifting in space would reduce the bandwidth requirements for Earth-to-ground data transmission.
Starcloud emerged from stealth a little less than a year ago when it announced a $2.4 million pre-seed investment round. 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,” Johnston said.
Johnston said Starcloud’s 132-pound (60-kilogram) demonstrator satellite is destined to be launched into low Earth orbit this summer by a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket as part of the Bandwagon 4 rideshare mission.
“We will be running 100x more powerful GPU compute than has ever been operated in space, with top-of-the-line, data-center-grade terrestrial NVIDIA GPUs on board,” he said. NVIDIA is providing the chips at a discount through its startup-friendly Inception program.
Johnston said the demonstrator satellite will help Starcloud test “training, inference and edge compute workloads for other satellites.”
Starcloud’s demonstrator satellite is being prepared for launch. (Courtesy of Philip Johnston via LinkedIn)
Johnston is a former associate at McKinsey & Co. who also co-founded an e-commerce venture called Opontia. Starcloud’s other founders are chief technology officer Ezra Feilden, whose resume includes engineering experience at Oxford Space Systems and Airbus Defense and Space; and chief engineer Adi Oltean, who worked as a principal software engineer at SpaceX’s Starlink facility in Redmond, Wash.
The Starcloud team currently has five members, including lead mechanical engineer Bailey Montaño, who worked previously at Helion Energy and SpaceX. Johnston said he expects the size of the team to double in the months ahead.
“Starcloud” follows in the footsteps of other starry names, ranging from SpaceX’s Starship and Boeing’s Starliner to Gravitics’ StarMax space modules and the Starlab space station planned by Voyager Space and Airbus. But Johnston said the principal reason behind his company’s name shift is to head off any potential confusion with another tech company.
“Apparently, Lumen Technologies has the right to ‘Lumen’ for data centers,” he said.
