Starcloud

Starcloud, founded in 2024 as Lumen Orbit by Philip Johnston, Adi Oltean, and Ezra Feilden, is developing orbital data centers — space-based compute infrastructure using GPUs to run AI workloads beyond Earth's power and cooling constraints. The company rebranded from Lumen Orbit to Starcloud in March 2025 following a naming conflict with an existing telecommunications company.

Starcloud's core thesis is that space offers effectively unlimited solar power and a natural heat sink via radiative cooling, making it an attractive environment for the enormous energy demands of AI compute at scale — avoiding the grid capacity and cooling infrastructure bottlenecks facing terrestrial data centers. The company demonstrated this concept with Starcloud-1, which flew an NVIDIA H100 GPU and successfully trained and ran large language model workloads in orbit in late 2025 — the first demonstration of its kind.

The company has raised significant capital, including a $170 million Series A round in March 2026 at a $1.1 billion valuation — reportedly the fastest unicorn valuation achieved by a Y Combinator company. Starcloud's roadmap includes Starcloud-2, targeting the first commercial orbital compute mission around 2027, and a longer-term vision of gigawatt-scale orbital data center constellations, reflected in FCC filings for satellite deployments at large scale.