Starcloud, a Redmond, WA-based company building data centers in space, has raised a $170 million in a Series A funding round led by Benchmark and EQT Ventures.
The round also saw participation from Macquarie Capital, NFX, Nebular, Y Combinator, Adjacent, 776 Ventures, Fuse Ventures, Manhattan West, and Monolith Power Systems. Angel investors included Gen. Stephen Wilson, Dennis Muilenburg, and Kevin Johnson. As part of the funding, Chetan Puttagunta, a General Partner at Benchmark, will join Starcloud’s board.
The company is valued at $1.1 Billion valuation. The raise brought the total amount to $200M.
The company plans to use the funds to speed up the design and development of its Starcloud-3 satellites, build a dedicated manufacturing facility, hire more team members, and secure future launch contracts.
Starcloud is building data centers in space. As AI needs more computing power, systems on Earth are struggling to keep up because building new data centers and energy projects can take up to five years. Starcloud solves this by putting data centers in low Earth orbit, where they can use almost unlimited, low-cost solar energy.
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Starcloud has moved very fast compared to most aerospace and tech companies. With just $3 million in early funding, it designed, built, and launched its first satellite, Starcloud-1, in only 21 months. Launched in November 2025, the mission achieved several major industry firsts.
- First NVIDIA H100 in space: Deployed a powerful GPU in orbit, boosting AI computing by 100x.
- First AI training in space: Successfully trained an AI model in orbit.
- First Gemini use in space: Ran a version of Gemini in orbit.
- First model fine-tuning in space: Showed advanced AI processing and fine-tuning in orbit.
Later this year, Starcloud will launch Starcloud-2. This satellite will have the largest commercial radiator ever sent to space and produce 100x more power than Starcloud-1. It will be the company’s first satellite to run real customer workloads, including early customer Crusoe, along with partnerships with Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud, and NVIDIA.
EQT is one of the largest private equity firms in the world, managing over $100 billion in assets and owning more than 70 data centers. Benchmark is one of the most successful venture capital firms based on returns.
“The AI revolution is hitting the limits of Earth’s energy supply. We’re running out of space to build new power projects for data centers,” said Philip Johnston, Co-Founder and CEO of Starcloud. “By moving AI computing to space, we can use unlimited solar energy and remove this problem. This funding will help us grow our space infrastructure quickly and meet the rising demand for sustainable AI computing.”
“We believe AI infrastructure is still in its early stages and will grow for many years,” said Chetan Puttagunta. “Starcloud is solving the challenge of scaling AI systems on Earth by building data centers in space. Their strong engineering team has made major progress in power, cooling, and manufacturing, while using money very efficiently. We believe their skills and big vision will help them grow at a massive scale.”
About Starcloud
Founded in 2024 by Adi Oltean, Ezra Feilden, and Philip Johnston, Starcloud is building data centers in space to solve AI energy challenges. The company launched its first satellite, Starcloud-1, in November 2025, which included the first NVIDIA H100 in space—about 100x more powerful than previous space GPUs—and was also the first to train an AI model in orbit.
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