U.S. Starcloud Raises $250 Million to Expand Orbital Computing and Data Centers

en.Wedoany.com Reported - Starcloud announced the completion of a $250 million Series A extension round, bringing its post-money valuation to $2.3 billion. Founded in 2024, the space data center company has now raised a total of $450 million since its inception.

The round was led by Manhattan West, with participation from existing investors Benchmark, EQT, Soma, NFX, 776, and others, as well as new investors NVIDIA, Cisco Investments, Cedar Capital, Goanna Capital, Standard Capital, and more. Ken Abdalla and Lauren Selig of Manhattan West led the transaction, and Lauren Selig will join Starcloud as a board observer.

Starcloud's collaboration with NVIDIA began in November 2025, when the company delivered the first NVIDIA H100 GPU to orbit via the Starcloud-1 satellite. As announced in March 2026, the two companies are now jointly developing NVIDIA's Space-1 Vera Rubin module. Designed for extreme space conditions, the module relies primarily on large radiators for cooling in space, and its components must withstand radiation exposure. Starcloud's satellites are expected to serve as early flight platforms for space-grade hardware, building on flight data accumulated since the successful deployment of the H100 on Starcloud-1 in November 2025.

Since the launch of Starcloud-1, the company has achieved several firsts in orbital computing: training the first AI model in space; running the first version of Google's Gemini in orbit; demonstrating high-compute inference and fine-tuning capabilities on flight hardware; and improving operational and general processes for running high-performance GPUs in orbit.

Starcloud is advancing its constellation vision of 88,000 satellites and 20 gigawatts of orbital computing capacity. The production line for the next-generation Starcloud-3 spacecraft is being developed at a new 100,000-square-foot manufacturing facility in Woodinville, Washington. The new funding will be used to continue building manufacturing capacity, support engineering work with NVIDIA, and procure future launch slots.

Cisco joined this round as a new investor, bringing expertise in networking, optics, and AI infrastructure to Starcloud. Aleem Rizvon, Vice President at Cisco Investments, stated that Cisco has long been committed to secure data center infrastructure and looks forward to bringing that expertise to the emerging orbital data center sector, adding that the company is excited to invest in Starcloud and support its mission of extending data centers into space.

Philip Johnston, co-founder and CEO of Starcloud, said that after delivering the first NVIDIA H100 to orbit last November, this new funding enables the company to build the infrastructure needed to send more of NVIDIA's most advanced GPUs into space.