Star Cloud

Starcloud is building data centers designed to operate in orbit rather than on the ground, betting that space offers three structural advantages for AI compute: continuous solar power without battery storage, passive radiative cooling instead of energy-hungry chillers, and freedom from the land-use and grid-interconnection permitting fights that slow terrestrial data centers. Its roadmap runs from the Starcloud-1 satellite through Starcloud-4, and the company has already trained AI models using orbital infrastructure. It was founded by Philip Johnston (CEO), a second-time founder with McKinsey experience advising national space agencies (Harvard MPA, Wharton MBA, CFA); Ezra Feilden (CTO), a satellite-structures engineer who worked on NASA's Lunar Pathfinder at Airbus Defense & Space and Oxford Space Systems; and Adi Oltean (Chief Engineer), a former SpaceX principal engineer on Starlink and 20-year Microsoft GPU-infrastructure veteran with 25+ patents. Starcloud has raised across six rounds since March 2024 — from a $500K Y Combinator check through two 2026 Series A rounds ($170M led by Benchmark and EQT, then $250M led by Manhattan West) — with NVIDIA, Sequoia, a16z, and Y Combinator among its 25+ named backers, and has been covered by The Economist, BBC, TechCrunch, Forbes, and The New York Times.