The Starcloud team. Photo: Starcloud

Starcloud, a space startup working to deploy satellites to serve as orbital data centers, raised $170 million in a Series A round announced Monday that values the company at $1.1 billion. 

The company was just founded in 2024 and launched its first satellite, Starcloud-1, in November 2025. It has raised more than $200 million and noted that this funding round makes it the fastest graduate of the Y Combinator program to reach “unicorn” status with $1 billion valuation. 

The funding round was split into two tranches. VC firm Benchmark led the initial round with participation from EQT Ventures. Both investors co-led an extension round. Other investors included Macquarie Capital, NFX, Nebular, Y Combinator, Adjacent, 776 Ventures, Fuse Ventures, Manhattan West, and Monolith Power Systems as well as angel investors like  former Boeing CEO Dennis Muilenburg. 

Starcloud, based in Redmond, Washington, recently filed with the FCC, seeking to deploy a system of up to 88,000 satellites to function as a distributed data center in space. Starcloud was also among the Nvidia partners for its space chips, and Starcloud-1 

The company is currently preparing to launch its second satellites, Starcloud-2, later this year, which will run commercial edge and cloud workloads. This funding round will support development on Starcloud-3 satellites, and allow the company to establish manufacturing capacity and increase headcount. 

“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,” Starcloud CEO and co-founder Philip Johnston commented in a release.