We’ve raised $8 million in Seed financing, led by non sibi ventures, to build virtual AI data centers in space.
Our software helps satellites process data and run AI onboard, turning raw information into useful results before sending it back to Earth. This funding will accelerate product development, expand our engineering and customer delivery teams, and bring Satlyt to more spacecraft and customers.
The round includes TLCOM, Antler, Slauson & Co., Launch Africa Ventures, Enza Capital, Askya Investment Partners, Demos, BAG Collective, Gaingels, Axian Investment, and others, with existing investors also making follow-on investments.
Making more use of computers already in space
Satellites collect images and measurements, but operators often need to send that data back to Earth before they can use it. Limited communications capacity can leave valuable information waiting for a connection.
Satlyt moves more processing onto the spacecraft itself. By analyzing images, measurements and system logs onboard, operators can reduce communications demands and get useful results sooner.
For satellite operators, this means making better use of computing hardware already aboard their spacecraft. For application developers, it creates a way to deploy and run software in orbit.
Our software is already operating in space from earlier deployments. A Google DeepMind case study describes our deployment of a Gemma model onboard a satellite to analyze system logs, software errors and stack traces locally.
“Running applications on existing spacecraft gives operators a way to do more with the computing hardware they already have in orbit. Our job is to make those applications practical to deploy and operate. This financing lets us expand the engineering and delivery teams needed to support more spacecraft and customers, while building toward computing resources that can work together across missions.”
Rama Afullo, Founder & CEO, Satlyt
Supporting research and commercial applications
Alongside the financing announcement, we outlined a deployment designed to support two applications on one spacecraft: research software developed through our NASA Glenn Small Business Technology Transfer (STTR) work with the University of Houston, and an imagery-processing application supplied by a commercial software company.
Satlyt provides the software deployment and operating layer. The host provider supplies the spacecraft and computing platform, while the commercial software company supplies its application.
Launch and successful onboard execution are separate milestones. We will assess results after the applications run in orbit.
Our current capabilities focus on processing within individual spacecraft. Over time, we aim to coordinate computing resources across spacecraft operated by different companies, creating virtual AI data centers in space.
“We see a vast opportunity for software to make spacecraft computing more useful to operators and application developers. Satlyt is addressing that opportunity through deployments on third-party platforms. Its existing onboard work and planned support for commercial and research applications give the team a concrete foundation for pursuing a broader computing platform in space.”
Kent Lucas, Managing Partner, non sibi ventures
Building across Africa and the US
Satlyt has its U.S. headquarters in Sunnyvale, California, and its Africa headquarters in Nairobi, Kenya. Our leadership team is entirely Kenyan-American, with a substantial engineering presence in Nairobi and team members elsewhere on the African continent.
Our Kenyan subsidiary and signed memoranda of understanding with the Kenya Space Agency and Angola’s GGPEN strengthen those connections. We’re proud to be building global infrastructure with talent and capital from across Africa and the US.
Thank you to our team, investors, customers and partners for backing the vision and the work behind it.
Read the coverage
Thank you to Tim Fernholz and TechCrunch for breaking the news, and to the publications that followed with coverage of our financing and work in orbit:
- TechCrunch: Our $8 million Seed announcement
- Payload: Satlyt Raises $8M Seed to Expand Its Virtual ODC Network
- Via Satellite: Satlyt Secures $8M in Seed Financing
- Space in Africa: Satlyt Raises USD 8 Million Seed to Turn Satellites into Virtual AI Data Centers
- TechCabal: The plan to build virtual data centres in space just got $8 million backing
Put your software in space
If you operate spacecraft or build applications that could benefit from processing data in orbit, we’d love to hear from you.
