GoKawiilStarcloud’s latest funding round values the space compute company at $1.1 billion, making it one of the fastest startups to reach unicorn status after graduating from Y Combinator.
The company’s Series A, which closed 17 months after its demo day presentation, was led by Benchmark and EQT Ventures. It’s another sign of the interest in outsourcing data centers to orbit as resource and political obstacles slow their development on Earth, but the business model depends on unproven technology and significant capital expenditure.
Starcloud has now raised a total of $200 million, and launched its first satellite with an Nvidia H100 GPU in November 2025. The company will launch a more powerful version, Starcloud 2, later this year with multiple GPUs, including an Nvidia Blackwell chip and an AWS server blade, as well as a bitcoin mining computer.
The company will also begin developing a data center spacecraft designed to launch from Starship, the reusable heavy lift rocket being built by Elon Musk’s SpaceX. Starcloud 3, as the spacecraft is named, will be a 200 kilowatts, three-ton spacecraft that fits the “pez dispenser” system SpaceX designed to deploy its Starlink satellites from Starship.
CEO and founder Philip Johnston said he expects that will be the first orbital data center that is cost-competitive with terrestrial data centers, with costs on the order of $.05 per kw/hour of power — if commercial launch costs land around $500 per kilogram.
The challenge is that Starship isn’t flying yet; Johnston says he expects commercial access to open up in 2028 and 2029. That’s the reality facing all the big space data center projects: powerful space computers will be cost-prohibitive until a new generation of rockets starts launching at a high operational cadence, something that might not happen until the 2030s.
“If it ends up being delayed, we’ll just carry on launching the smaller versions on Falcon 9,” Johnston said. “We’re not going to be competitive on energy costs until Starship is flying frequently.”
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