US-based space tech company Starcloud has secured $170m in Series A funding led by Benchmark and EQT Ventures, valuing the company at $1.1bn.

This milestone comes 17 months after the company’s Y Combinator demo day, making it the fastest startup in Y Combinator’s history to reach unicorn status.

The latest investment increases Starcloud’s total capital raised to $200m and more than doubles the size of the next largest Series A round by a Y Combinator company.

The funding is intended to support the design and construction of Starcloud’s next-generation Starcloud-3 satellites, expand its workforce, procure future launch contracts, and establish a dedicated manufacturing facility.

Benchmark general partner Chetan Puttagunta will join Starcloud’s board as part of the transaction.

Starcloud develops data centres in low Earth orbit, aiming to address rising demand for computing power amid challenges in expanding terrestrial infrastructure.

On Earth, building new data centres and energy projects can take up to five years due to permitting and construction delays.

By operating in space, Starcloud aims to capitalise on abundant, low-cost solar energy.

The company launched its first satellite, Starcloud-1, in November 2025 after raising $3m in pre-seed funding.

The mission delivered several industry firsts, including the deployment of an NVIDIA H100 GPU in orbit, successful in-space AI model training, orbital inference on Gemini, and a demonstration of model fine-tuning beyond Earth’s atmosphere.

Starcloud plans to launch its second satellite later this year.

Starcloud-2 will feature what is described as the largest commercial deployable radiator sent into space and is expected to offer 100 times the power generation capabilities of its predecessor.

The satellite will be used to run commercial edge and cloud workloads for customers such as Crusoe and in partnership with AWS, Google Cloud, and NVIDIA.

The Series A round was executed in two tranches: one led by Benchmark with participation from EQT Ventures and a subsequent extension co-led by both firms.

Several other investors participated in the oversubscribed round. These include Macquarie Capital, NFX, Nebular, Y Combinator, Adjacent, 776 Ventures, Fuse Ventures, Manhattan West, Monolith Power Systems, as well as individual investors such as General Stephen Wilson, Dennis Muilenburg (former CEO of Boeing), and Kevin Johnson (former Starbucks CEO).

"Starcloud secures $170m funding for space data centres" was originally created and published by Verdict, a GlobalData owned brand.

 

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