Overview
- Starcloud, which announced the round Monday, secured $170 million led by Benchmark and EQT at a $1.1 billion valuation, and Benchmark’s Chetan Puttagunta will join the board.
- In November 2025, the company’s Starcloud‑1 mission ran an Nvidia H100 in orbit and reported the first training of a large language model in space.
- Starcloud says its next satellite, Starcloud‑2, is planned for an October 2026 launch with about 100× the power of its first craft, Nvidia’s Blackwell B200, AWS Outposts hardware, and initial commercial workloads including customer Crusoe.
- New funding advances the three‑ton, 200‑kilowatt Starcloud‑3 built for SpaceX’s Starship and tied to a long‑term plan for an 88,000‑satellite network that still awaits regulatory permission.
- Executives say space‑based compute will only reach cost parity after frequent Starship flights drive down launch prices, even as rivals like SpaceX, Blue Origin and Google pursue similar systems and partners such as Nvidia, AWS and Google Cloud line up to test services that could ease grid strain and siting fights on Earth.