Starcloud added $250 million to its Series A round, valuing the company at $2.3 billion, according to TechCrunch. The extension was led by Manhattan West Ventures, with new participation from Nvidia and Cisco Investments alongside existing backers Benchmark, EQT, Soma, NFX and 776, bringing Starcloud's total funding to $450 million since it was founded in 2024.
Starcloud builds satellites that carry data center grade GPUs to run AI workloads in orbit. It launched Starcloud-1 in November 2025 with what the company says is the first Nvidia H100 GPU in space, and is developing a larger spacecraft, Starcloud-3, meant to fly on SpaceX's Starship, according to a company announcement carried by the Rutland Herald.
"Last November we put the first NVIDIA H100 in orbit. Today this fresh capital empowers us to build the infrastructure to launch many more of NVIDIA's most advanced GPUs into space," said Philip Johnston, Starcloud's co-founder and chief executive.
Starcloud has asked the Federal Communications Commission for permission to operate a constellation of 88,000 spacecraft with a combined 20 gigawatts of compute capacity. Johnston told TechCrunch the bigger constraint is not power but rockets: "We're going to need to book an enormous amount of launch, launch is pretty constrained right now because [SpaceX's] Falcon 9 program is scheduled to end in 2028."
Orbital compute only makes sense if launch costs keep falling and satellites can be cooled and radiation-hardened cheaply enough to compete with a terrestrial data center plugged into a power grid. Investors betting $250 million on Starcloud are betting that math closes before ground-based power and permitting bottlenecks close first.