Starcloud, a company developing space-based data center infrastructure, said it has raised $170 million in a Series A funding round at a $1.1 billion valuation.
The company said the milestone comes 17 months after its Y Combinator demo day, a timeframe it describes as the fastest to reach that valuation among firms from the accelerator.
The round brings Starcloud’s total funding to approximately $200 million, according to the company.
Starcloud is working on systems designed to run artificial intelligence (AI) computing workloads in low Earth orbit. The company’s approach is based on the idea that space-based infrastructure could access continuous solar energy and avoid some of the land, power, and permitting constraints associated with building data centers on Earth.
CEO Philip Johnston said the company’s goal is to address energy limitations affecting AI infrastructure by relocating compute capacity to space.
“By moving AI compute to space, we unlock access to unlimited solar power and completely remove the energy bottleneck,” Johnston said. “This funding allows us to rapidly scale our orbital infrastructure and meet the massive commercial demand for sustainable AI compute."
Starcloud said it built and launched its first satellite, Starcloud-1, within 21 months using about $3 million in pre-seed funding. The satellite was launched in November 2025. The company reported that the mission included running AI-related workloads in orbit, including training, inference, and model fine-tuning, as well as deploying a high-performance graphics processing unit.
Starcloud said it plans to use the new funding to continue development of its satellite systems, expand its workforce, establish a manufacturing facility, and secure future launch capacity.
The company said it intends to launch a second satellite, Starcloud-2, later this year. According to Starcloud, the system is expected to have greater power generation capacity than its predecessor and include a deployable radiator designed to manage heat in orbit. The company said the satellite is intended to support commercial workloads, including from early customers and partners such as Crusoe, Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud, and NVIDIA.
The financing round was led by Benchmark and EQT and included participation from several venture firms, infrastructure investors, and individual backers.
As part of the funding round, Benchmark general partner Chetan Puttagunta will join the company’s board. In a statement, Puttagunta said the firm views space-based data centers as one potential approach to scaling AI infrastructure, and cited Starcloud’s work in areas such as power systems and thermal management.