Redmond, Wash.-based Starcloud got its start just last year under a different name — Lumen Orbit — but the newly renamed company is already filling out its seed funding round with $10 million in fresh investment for space-based data centers.
The new influx of capital comes after December’s announcement that the startup brought in $11 million from investors including NFX, Y Combinator (or YC, for short), FUSE, Soma Capital and scout funds from Andreessen Horowitz and Sequoia. Starcloud graduated from Y Combinator’s summer cohort last year.
The additional funding comes from previous seed investors and several new venture capital firms in the form of a simplified agreement for future equity, or SAFE. If you add up the $11 million and the $10 million, “it can be thought of as a $21M seed, which is one of the highest-ever seed rounds for a company coming out of YC,” Philip Johnston, Starcloud’s CEO and one of its founders, told GeekWire in an email. Johnston said Starcloud doesn’t intend to identify the new investors until a Series A funding round takes place.
Starcloud’s big idea is to place a network of megawatt-scale computer servers in Earth orbit, powered by grids of solar panels that could stretch as much as 2.5 miles (4 kilometers) in width. Such space-based facilities would offer alternatives to terrestrial data centers that are taking up increasing amounts of territory, gobbling up increasing amounts of power, and stirring up increasing levels of controversy.
