Starcloud

Starcloud, founded in January 2024 as Lumen Orbit by Philip Johnston, Ezra Feilden, and Adi Oltean, is building data centers designed to operate in orbit rather than on Earth. The company's premise, as stated on its own website, is that as launch costs fall, space-based data centers can draw on continuous solar energy and radiative cooling to scale toward gigawatt capacity while avoiding the permitting constraints that slow terrestrial data center construction.

The company was originally based in El Segundo, California before relocating to Redmond, Washington. It rebranded from Lumen Orbit to Starcloud in March 2025 following a trademark dispute with Lumen Technologies. Starcloud has said it is the only company currently operating a Nvidia H100 data center GPU in orbit, and has requested permission from the U.S. Federal Communications Commission to operate a constellation of 88,000 spacecraft.

Starcloud has raised capital across a pre-seed round, a Y Combinator-backed seed round, and a Series A that was later extended, reaching a reported $2.3 billion valuation by August 2026. As of that time, TechCrunch reported the company had 25 employees and was building out a 100,000-square-foot production facility in Woodinville, Washington, while developing a next-generation satellite line, Starcloud-2, built around 8 kW compute units intended to perform orbital inference work for customers including U.S. government agencies.