Starcloud, the company building data centers in space, announced today that it has raised a $170 million in Series A funding at a $1.1 billion valuation, led by Benchmark and EQT Ventures.
The company stated, “Achieving unicorn status just 17 months after its Y Combinator demo day, Starcloud is now the fastest unicorn in Y Combinator history.” The round is also more than double the size of the next largest YC Series A and brings the company’s total capital raised to $200 million.
The new capital will speed up the design and construction of the company’s next-generation Starcloud-3 satellites, the creation of a dedicated manufacturing facility, crucial headcount growth, and the securing of future launch contracts.
In a press release Monday, Philip Johnston, Co-Founder and CEO of Starcloud, stated: “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. This funding allows us to rapidly scale our orbital infrastructure and meet the massive commercial demand for sustainable AI compute.”
As part of the financing, Benchmark General Partner and six-time Midas lister, Chetan Puttagunta, will join the board of Starcloud.
“We believe that we are in the early innings of a decades-long buildout of AI infrastructure,” said Puttagunta. “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.”
Starcloud is already working with partners like Nvidia and the cloud divisions of Amazon and Google. In November, it launched a satellite with Nvidia’s H100 chip, showcasing AI training and inference in orbit in an industry-first move.
By CEO NA Editorial Staff
