Starcloud, founded in 2024 and based in Redmond, Washington, develops orbital data centers that place GPU compute into low Earth orbit to serve AI training workloads. The company's core technology leverages abundant solar energy and radiative cooling in space to reduce energy costs by an estimated 10x compared to terrestrial data centers, while avoiding permitting constraints. Co-founders Philip Johnston (CEO), Ezra Feilden (CTO), and Adi Oltean (Chief Engineer) lead the team; Johnston previously worked at McKinsey on satellite projects, Feilden spent a decade on satellite design at Airbus Defense Space and Oxford Space Systems, and Oltean was a Principal Software Engineer at SpaceX responsible for tracking beams technology and spent 20 years at Microsoft on GPU clusters. In March 2026, Starcloud raised a $170 million Series A led by Benchmark, achieving a $1.1 billion valuation 17 months after Y Combinator demo day. The company launched its first satellite and plans to deploy a second in October 2026 with 100x greater power generation capacity than the first.