Starcloud, a space infrastructure company building orbital data centers, announced it has raised $170 million in Series A funding at a $1.1 billion valuation, achieving unicorn status just 17 months after completing the Y Combinator accelerator program. The round was led by Benchmark and EQT Ventures, with additional participation from major global investors and strategic partners, bringing total capital raised to $200 million.
The company is developing data centers in low Earth orbit to address the growing energy constraints of terrestrial AI infrastructure. As demand for artificial intelligence compute continues to surge, building new data centers and energy capacity on Earth can take years due to permitting and infrastructure challenges. Starcloud’s approach leverages continuous access to solar energy in space to bypass these limitations.
With just $3 million in pre-seed funding, Starcloud designed, built, and launched its first satellite, Starcloud-1, in 21 months. The satellite, launched in November 2025, achieved several industry firsts, including deploying an NVIDIA H100 GPU in orbit, training an AI model in space, running inference on Gemini, and demonstrating orbital fine-tuning capabilities.
The new funding will support the development of next-generation Starcloud-3 satellites, the expansion of manufacturing capabilities, hiring, and securing future launch contracts. The company is also preparing to launch Starcloud-2 later this year, which will feature significantly greater power generation and the largest commercial deployable radiator sent to space. This satellite is expected to support commercial edge and cloud workloads, with early customer Crusoe and partnerships involving AWS, Google Cloud, and NVIDIA.
The funding round was conducted in two tranches, initially led by Benchmark with participation from EQT, followed by an extension co-led by both firms. Additional investors include Macquarie Capital, NFX, Nebular, Y Combinator, Adjacent, 776 Ventures, Fuse Ventures, Manhattan West, and Monolith Power Systems. Notable angel investors include General Stephen Wilson, former Boeing CEO Dennis Muilenburg, and former Starbucks CEO Kevin Johnson. Benchmark General Partner Chetan Puttagunta will join Starcloud’s board as part of the investment.
Starcloud is positioning itself at the intersection of aerospace and AI infrastructure, aiming to create a scalable, energy-efficient alternative to Earth-based data centers as global demand for compute continues to accelerate.
KEY QUOTES:
“By moving AI compute to space, we unlock access to unlimited solar power and completely remove the energy bottleneck. This funding allows us to rapidly scale our orbital infrastructure and meet the massive commercial demand for sustainable AI compute.”
Philip Johnston, Co-Founder And CEO Of Starcloud
“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. Their extraordinary engineering team has achieved significant technical breakthroughs in power and cooling, as well as innovative advancements in manufacturing processes. Most notably, the great team at Starcloud has reached these milestones while remaining exceptionally capital efficient. We believe their technical rigor and remarkable ambitions will enable them to achieve extraordinary scale.”
Chetan Puttagunta, General Partner At Benchmark
