With Broadcom signaling that hyperscalers are continuing to invest heavily to build out AI data centers, Lumen could win new fiber network and support services deals.

GeekWire’s startup coverage documents the Pacific Northwest entrepreneurial scene. Sign up for our weekly startup newsletter , and check out the GeekWire funding tracker and venture capital directory .An artist’s conception shows data-center spacecraft being added to an orbital array. (Starcloud via YouTube)Redmond, Wash.-based Starcloud got its start just last year under a different name — Lumen Orbit — but the newly renamed company is already filling out its seed funding round with $10 million in fresh investment for space-based data centers.The new influx of capital comes after December’s announcement that the startup brought in $11 million from investors including NFX, Y Combinator (or YC, for short), FUSE, Soma Capital and scout funds from Andreessen Horowitz and Sequoia. Starcloud graduated from Y Combinator’s summer cohort last year.The additional funding comes from previous seed investors and several new venture capital firms in the form of a simplified agreement for future equity, or SAFE. If you add up the $11 million and the $10 million, “it can be thought of as a $21M seed, which is one of the highest-ever seed rounds for a company coming out of YC,” Philip Johnston, Starcloud’s CEO and one of its founders, told GeekWire in an email.Johnston said Starcloud doesn’t intend to identify the new investors until a Series A funding round takes place.Starcloud’s big idea is to place a network of megawatt-scale computer servers in Earth orbit, powered by grids of solar panels that could stretch as much as 2.5 miles (4 kilometers) in width.Such space-based facilities would offer alternatives to terrestrial data centers that are taking up increasing amounts of territory, gobbling up increasing amounts of electrical power, and stirring up increasing levels of controversy.Space-based data centers could play a key role in processing the massive amounts of imagery and other data provided by Earth observation satellites. Doing the computational heavy lifting in space would reduce the bandwidth requirements for Earth-to-ground data transmission.Starcloud emerged from stealth a little less than a year ago when it announced a $2.4 million pre-seed investment round