Starcloud
American company
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Starcloud, Inc., commonly known as Starcloud, is a United States–based company that designs, builds, and deploys data centers in space using proprietary technology.[1][2][3][4][5]
Ezra Feilden
Adi Oltean
 Starcloud logo since 2025 | |
| Company type | Private |
|---|---|
| Industry | Space |
| Founded | January 2024 in El Segundo, California, USA |
| Founders | Philip Johnston Ezra Feilden Adi Oltean |
| Headquarters | , |
Key people | Philip Johnston (CEO) Ezra Feilden (CTO) Adi Oltean (Chief Engineer) |
Number of employees | 15 (2026) |
| Website | www |
History
The company was founded in January 2024 in El Segundo, California under the name Lumen Orbit by Philip Johnston (ex-McKinsey & Company), Adi Oltean (ex-SpaceX, Microsoft Azure) and Ezra Feilden (ex-Airbus Defence and Space).[1][6] Soon after founding, in February 2024, the company relocated to Redmond, Washington to be close to the space and data center talent at Starlink, Amazon Leo, AWS, and Azure.[7]
In Summer 2024, the company released a white paper[8][9][10] and went through the Y Combinator startup accelerator in San Francisco, where they were selected by Tom Blomfield and raised one of the largest seed rounds ever at Y Combinator demo day.[11]
In March 2025, the company rebranded to Starcloud after a legal challenge from Lumen Technologies and raised additional seed funding, bringing the total to approximately $34M.[12][13][14][15] Investors include the scout funds of Sequoia and A16z, In-Q-Tel, NFX, Plug and Play, as well as angels, including AI expert Jan Leike.[16]
In November 2025, Starcloud launched its first satellite, designated Starcloud-1, equipped with a Nvidia H100 GPU which Nvidia claimed was 100x more powerful GPU compute than had been in orbit before.[17] The company described the mission as the first deployment of "data-center-class GPU compute" in orbit.[18][19][20][21]
Starcloud stated that the project aimed to explore how orbital conditions, including continuous solar exposure and radiative cooling, could support large-scale computing in space.[22][23][24]
In December 2025, Starcloud became the first company to operate a large language model on a high powered GPU (Gemini's Gemma, developed by Google DeepMind) onboard a spacecraft, and the first to perform in-orbit training of a large language model (nanoGPT, developed by Andrej Karpathy).[25][26][27][28][29]
On February 3rd, 2026, Starcloud submitted a proposal to the FCC for a constellation of up to 88,000 satellites for orbital data centers. [30]
On March 7th, 2026, Starcloud announced that it intended to be the first to mine Bitcoin in space, flying bitcoin mining ASICs on its second satellite, Starcloud-2.[31]
Partnerships
In 2024, Starcloud was selected as a member of the Nvidia Inception program, the Google Cloud Accelerator, and the Defense Innovation Unit Accelerator.[32][33]
In October 2025, Crusoe and Starcloud announced an agreement, as Crusoe will deploy its "Crusoe Cloud" platform on a Starcloud satellite planned for late 2026. Under this agreement, GPU capacity from orbit is expected to be offered from early 2027.[34]
Starcloud-1 is also using the H100 to run high-powered inference on Synthetic-aperture radar (SAR) data from Capella Space in order to draw insights on orbit for the first time, without needing to downlink the data before being able to analyse it.[35]