Starcloud Raises $250 Million to Scale AI with Orbital Data Centers
Aug 21, 2026, 4:41 PM
425 Business
Originally published on 425 Business.
Redmond-based Starcloud, which is building data centers in space to solve the AI-energy bottleneck on Earth, today announced a $250 million Series A extension funding round, which brings Starcloud’s value to $2.3 billion, according to a news release.
The round was led by Manhattan West, with participation from existing investors Benchmark, EQT, Soma, NFX, 776, and others, alongside new investors Nvidia, Cisco Investments, Cedar Capital, Goanna Capital, Standard Capital, and more. The funding brings Starcloud’s total capital raised to $450 million since its founding in 2024.
In March, Starcloud announced it raised a $170 million Series A, bringing the company’s total capital raised to $200 million and valuing it at $1.1 billion. Starcloud’s value has more than doubled this year with the latest $250-million investment.
Starcloud’s collaboration with Nvidia began when the company flew the first Nvidia H100 GPU to orbit aboard its Starcloud-1 satellite in November 2025. The two companies are now working together on Nvidia’s Space-1 Vera Rubin Module.
“Last November we put the first NVIDIA H100 in orbit,” Philip Johnston, co-founder and CEO of Starcloud, said in the release. “Today this fresh capital empowers us to build the infrastructure to launch many more of NVIDIA’s most advanced GPUs into space.”
The Nvidia Space-1 Vera Rubin Module is built for extreme conditions in space, where cooling is primarily via large radiators and components must withstand radiation exposure. Starcloud’s satellites are expected to serve as an early flight platform for space-rated hardware, building on the flight data gathered since Starcloud-1’s successful H100 deployment in November.
Since launching Starcloud-1, the company trained the first AI model in space, ran the first version of Google’s Gemini in orbit, demonstrated high-powered inference and fine-tuning on flight hardware, and evolved operations and general procedures for running high-performance GPUs on orbit, according to the release.
Starcloud is progressing toward its vision of a constellation of 88,000 satellites and 20 gigawatts of orbital compute capacity. Development of production lines for its next-generation Starcloud-3 spacecraft is underway at a new 100,000-square-foot manufacturing facility in Woodinville.
Cisco joined the round as a new investor, adding networking, optical, and AI infrastructure expertise to Starcloud’s roster of backers.
“Cisco has long been a leader in secure data center infrastructure and looks forward to bringing that expertise to the emerging world of orbital data centers,” Aleem Rizvon, vice president at Cisco Investments, said in today’s release. “Cisco Investments is excited to invest in Starcloud as they expand data centers into space.”
Ken Abdalla and Lauren Selig led the round from Manhattan West, and Lauren Selig joins as a board observer. The additional capital will fund continued buildout of manufacturing capacity, engineering work in collaboration with Nvidia, as well as procurement of future launch allocation, the release added.
