Starcloud, a startup building satellites for AI inference in space, closed a $250 million Series A extension led by Manhattan West Ventures, pushing its valuation to $2.3 billion. Nvidia contributed $25 million to the round, alongside Cisco, Benchmark, EQT and several other investors.
The fresh capital will fund manufacturing expansion and development of the Starcloud-3 spacecraft, built for SpaceX's Starship rocket. CEO Philip Johnston said securing launch capacity has become one of the company's biggest costs, as SpaceX plans to retire the Falcon 9 by 2028 in favor of the still-unproven Starship.
Starcloud already operates Nvidia H100 GPUs in orbit — the only company to do so — and holds FCC approval for up to 88,000 spacecraft. Its smaller Starcloud-2 satellites, each carrying 8 kW of compute, are set to launch on rideshare missions in 2027, with a next-generation Nvidia Vera Rubin Space-1 chip planned for 2028.