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YC2024

Starcloud

Data centers in space

Climate
Seattle, WAFounded 20241-10 employees

About

Starcloud is building data centers in space, initially to provide GPU compute to other satellites, and later to address the rapidly growing demand for energy caused by the deployment of AI. Falling launch costs give Starcloud access to abundant energy, radiative cooling, and the ability to rapidly scale in space. In November 2025, just 21 months after founding, Starcloud launched its first satellite, Starcloud-1 to space. This has an Nvidia H100, which is 100x more powerful GPU than has ever been operated in space before. With this, they became the first entity to train an LLM in space and the first to run a version of Gemini in space. Starcloud will soon also run high-powered inference on Capella SAR data on orbit for the first time. Starcloud is launching its second satellite in October 2026, which will have 100x the power generation of the first and generate more cash than it costs to build and launch. Starcloud expects that within 10 years, most new data centers will be being built in space for the energy. In March 2026, Starcloud raised a $170M Series A led by Benchmark, becoming the fastest unicorn in YC history, just 17 months after demo day.

Founders

Philip Johnston

Philip Johnston

CEO

Philip is a second-time founder who previously spent time at McKinsey & Co. working on satellite projects for national space agencies. Philip has an MPA in National Security & Technology from Harvard University, an MBA from Wharton, an MA in Applied Mathematics & Theoretical Physics from Columbia University, and is a CFA Charter holder.

Product

Starcloud

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