Starcloud (formerly Lumen Orbit) is a Redmond, Washington startup building solar-powered data centers in orbit, aiming to run AI compute on satellites where continuous solar energy and radiative cooling into the vacuum of space offer near-limitless power and passive cooling. Founded in January 2024 by Philip Johnston (ex-McKinsey), Adi Oltean (ex-SpaceX, Microsoft Azure) and Ezra Feilden (ex-Airbus Defence and Space), the Y Combinator (S24) company launched Starcloud-1 in November 2025 — the first NVIDIA H100 GPU operated in orbit, which it says trained an LLM and ran a version of Google's Gemini in space. Its $170M Series A (March 2026), co-led by Benchmark and EQT Ventures, valued the company at $1.1B and made it the fastest company in YC history to reach unicorn status. The follow-on Starcloud-2 mission will fly an NVIDIA Blackwell GPU cluster with payloads from AWS, Google Cloud, NVIDIA and Crusoe.

Company Profile

Founders & Key People

Investors

Products

• Starcloud-1 (first NVIDIA H100 GPU in orbit, launched Nov 2025)
• Starcloud-2 (NVIDIA Blackwell GPU cluster, targeting 2026-2027)
• Orbital AI training & inference compute
• Solar-powered space data centers

Competitors

SpaceAI InfrastructureData CentersUnicornDeep TechY Combinator

Private-company numbers are not real-time. Reflects publicly disclosed valuations from press releases, news reports, and tender offers as of 2026-Q1. Refreshed quarterly.