Starcloud

This article is about the company. For the astronomical phenomenon, see Star cloud. For the fictional character, see Transformers: Zone.

Starcloud is a United States–based company that designs, builds, and deploys data centers in space.^[1][2][3][4]

Starcloud

Founded	2024; 1 year ago (2024)
Founders	Philip Johnston, Adi Oltean, Ezra Fielden
Website	www.starcloud.com

History

The company was founded in early 2024 under the name Lumen Orbit by Philip Johnston (ex-McKinsey & Company), Adi Oltean (ex-SpaceX, Microsoft Azure) and Ezra Fielden (ex-Airbus Defence and Space).^[1]

In Summer 2024, the company released a white paper^[5][6][7] and went through the Y Combinator startup accelerator in San Francisco, where they were selected by Tom Blomfield.^[8]

In March 2025, the company rebranded to Starcloud after a legal challenge from Lumen Technologies and raised additional seed funding, bringing the total to approximately $34M.^{[9][10][11][12]} Investors include the scout funds of Sequoia and A16z, In-Q-Tel, NFX, Plug and Play, as well as angels, including AI expert Jan Leike.^[13]

In November 2025, Starcloud launched its first satellite, designated Starcloud-1, equipped with a Nvidia H100 GPU. The company described the mission as the first deployment of "data-center-class GPU compute" in orbit.^{[14][15][16][17]}

Starcloud stated that the project aimed to explore how orbital conditions, including continuous solar exposure and radiative cooling, could support large-scale computing in space.^[18][19][20]

In December 2025, Starcloud became the first company to operate a large language model on a high powered GPU (Gemini's Gemma, developed by Google DeepMind) onboard a spacecraft, and the first to perform in-orbit training of a large language model (nanoGPT, developed by Andrej Karpathy).^{[21][22][23][24]}

Partnerships

Starcloud was selected as a member of the Nvidia Inception program. ^[25][26]

In October 2025, Crusoe and Starcloud announced an agreement, as Crusoe will deploy its "Crusoe Cloud" platform on a Starcloud satellite planned for late 2026. Under this agreement, GPU capacity from orbit is expected to be offered from early 2027.^[27][28]