Orbital data center startup Starcloud added $250 million to its Series A round just five months after the raise, more than doubling its valuation to $2.3 billion. Manhattan West led the Series A expansion announced Friday afternoon.
Existing investors Benchmark, EQT, Soma, NFX, 776, and others, participated in the round as well, with new investors Nvidia, Cisco Investments, Cedar Capital, Goanna Capital, Standard Capital, and others.
Starcloud previously raised $170 million at a $1.1 billion valuation in late March. With a total of $450 million raised, it is one of the highest-funded new startups targeting the emerging market of orbital data centers. The company is working toward its plan of deploying a massive, 88,000-satellite constellation to provide 20 gigawatts of orbital compute.
Starcloud launched its first satellite, Starcloud-1, in November, putting the first Nvidia H100 GPU into orbit. The company reports that Starcloud-1 ran the first version of Google’s Gemini in orbit and demonstrated high-powered inference and fine-tuning.
The company says this funding will help build out its manufacturing capacity, fund engineering work in collaboration with Nvidia, and fund launch access.
“Last November we put the first Nvidia H100 in orbit. Today this fresh capital empowers us to build the infrastructure to launch many more of Nvidia’s most advanced GPUs into space,” Starcloud CEO and co-founder Philip Johnston said in a statement.
