Starcloud, a US-based space tech company, has raised $170 million in a Series A round at a $1.1 billion valuation, from Redmond, Washington. The round was led by Benchmark and EQT Ventures, bringing total funding to $200 million.
The space infrastructure firm, founded in 2024, is building data centres in low Earth orbit to address rising energy demand from AI workloads. The company said it reached unicorn status 17 months after its Y Combinator demo day, making it the fastest to reach unicorn status in the accelerator’s history.
Starcloud plans to use the funds to develop its third satellite, scale orbital infrastructure, develop new satellites, expand hiring, and secure future launch contracts.
CEO Philip Johnston said the company aims to bypass limits on terrestrial energy supply. “The AI revolution is colliding with the physical limits of our terrestrial energy grid… By moving AI compute to space, we unlock access to unlimited solar power and completely remove the energy bottleneck.”
Starcloud builds data centres in orbit, where solar energy is abundant, and there are no land or permitting constraints. On Earth, new energy and data centre projects can take up to five years to complete, the company described in a statement.
With $3 million in pre-seed funding, Starcloud developed and launched its first satellite, Starcloud-1, in November 2025. The mission deployed an NVIDIA H100 GPU in orbit and completed AI training, inference, and fine-tuning tasks.
The company plans to launch Starcloud-2 later this year. The satellite will include a large deployable radiator and generate significantly more power than its predecessor. It will also support commercial workloads for early customer Crusoe, alongside partnerships with Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud, and NVIDIA.
As part of the funding, Chetan Puttagunta, General Partner at Benchmark, will join the board. “We believe that we are in the early innings of a decades-long buildout of AI infrastructure. Starcloud is pioneering a solution to the challenges of scaling AI infrastructure on Earth with orbital data centres,” he said.
The round also included participation from other investors, including Macquarie Capital, NFX, Y Combinator, and Monolithic Power Systems, as well as several angel investors.
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