Starcloud has extended its Series A by $250 million, pushing the orbital data center startup’s valuation to $2.3 billion. Manhattan West Ventures led the tranche, with Nvidia, Cisco, Benchmark, EQT, Soma, NFX and 776 also participating, and one person familiar with the deal said Nvidia put in $25 million.
The company builds satellites that run AI inference in orbit. It already operates an Nvidia H100 GPU in space through its Starcloud One testbed, and it is feeding those learnings back to the chipmaker as Nvidia designs Vera Rubin Space-1, its first purpose-built orbital chip.
CEO Philip Johnston said the extra capital mostly buys launch certainty. SpaceX plans to retire the Falcon 9 around 2028, while Starship is not yet flying regularly, and rivals like New Glenn, Vulcan and Neutron are still ramping. Starcloud has asked the FCC for permission to operate 88,000 spacecraft and wants to sign large Starship contracts as soon as it can.
The money also funds a bigger factory. Starcloud is building production lines at a 100,000 square foot facility in Woodinville, Washington, and plans to fly its next-generation 8 kW compute satellites, dubbed Starcloud-2, on rideshare missions in 2027 for customers that include US government agencies. A larger spacecraft, Starcloud-3, is designed for Starship and targeted at late 2028.
The company, which employs about 25 people, is betting that Starship’s reusability will eventually make orbital inference cheap enough to rival terrestrial data centers. “We can see what’s coming – we’re going to need to book an enormous amount of launch,” Johnston said.
