Lumen Orbit, the startup aiming to deploy data centers in space, has rebranded and secured additional funding.
The Washington-based company recently announced a name change, rebranding to Starcloud. And, as noted by Geekwire, the company has secured a further $10m to fund its plans.
“Excited to share that we have raised an additional $10m, bringing the total seed raise for Starcloud (formerly Lumen Orbit) to $21m,” co-founder and CEO Philip Johnston said on LinkedIn. On the name change, he posted: “Same mission to build huge data centers in space.”
The additional funding comes from previous seed investors and several new venture capital firms in the form of a simplified agreement for future equity (SAFE) – funding that is turned into equity when certain terms are met. Common SAFE triggering events, also known as conversion terms, include an equity financing round, an acquisition, or an initial public offering (IPO).
Johnston told Geekwire that Starcloud doesn’t intend to identify the new investors until a Series A funding round takes place.
“[The funding] allows us to accelerate our plans to build large data centers in space, and means that we are funded through at least the next two launches,” Johnston said.
Starcloud emerged from stealth last year with $10m in funding from NFX, Y Combinator, FUSE, Soma Capital, and scout funds from Andreessen Horowitz and Sequoia.
The company aims to deploy a large amount of compute power in orbit, which it claims can be developed and operated more cheaply than on Terra Firma. Starcloud has lofty ambitions, with renders and statements about a potential 5GW deployment. That would require 4km sq of solar array, the company said.
Starcloud’s 132 lb (60 kg) Lumen-1 demonstrator satellite is destined to be launched into low Earth orbit this summer by a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket as part of the Bandwagon 4 rideshare mission, currently due to launch in July 2025.
The satellite, based on Astro Digital’s Corvus-Micro bus, will test the company’s in-orbit computing technology. The expected mission lifetime is 11 months, after which the satellite will de-orbit from its 325 km orbit and burn up. Iridium is working with Starcloud on the project.
“The Lumen-1 mission is Lumen’s first satellite mission and will demonstrate technologies required to build an in-orbit edge computing node for our orbital data center concept,” Starcloud said in its application with the FCC.
“We will be running 100x more powerful GPU compute than has ever been operated in space, with top-of-the-line, data-center-grade terrestrial Nvidia GPUs on board,” Johnston told Geekwire, He said the demonstrator satellite will help Starcloud test “training, inference, and Edge compute workloads for other satellites.”
Johnston also told the publication the main reason behind the company’s name shift was to avoid confusion with fiber firm Lumen.
“Apparently, Lumen Technologies has the right to ‘Lumen’ for data centers,” he said.
As previously reported by DCD, Starcloud’s proposals make a number of potentially optimistic assumptions on the costs to build and launch large-scale modules into orbit. It claims it will be able to launch a 40MW data center into orbit for just $8.2m.
