YC CEO Garry Tan reports Starcloud (formerly Lumen Orbit) has reached a $1B valuation just 17 months after Demo Day, making it the fastest YC company ever to achieve this milestone. The company builds data centers in orbit.

Starcloud has signed a contract with SpaceX's Starlink to integrate mini laser terminals across its orbital data center constellation. The deal covers over 50 Starlink Mini Lasers across more than 25 satellites, with the first hardware expected on orbit within one year. Each Starcloud satellite will carry two Starlink Mini Laser terminals, providing up to 25 Gbps of continuous intersatellite connectivity at distances up to 4,000 kilometres. The optical links eliminate the need for bandwidth-constrained ground stations by enabling direct communication between Starcloud satellites and the Starlink constellation. Starcloud launched its first satellite in November 2025, featuring the first NVIDIA H100 GPU on orbit. In March 2026, the company raised $170 million in a Series A round at a $1.1 billion valuation led by Benchmark.

Orbital, a startup building space-based AI data centres, has raised an undisclosed amount in funding led by Andreessen Horowitz's a16z Speedrun. The company plans to launch its first test mission, Orbital-1, in April 2027 to demonstrate proof-of-concept for orbital AI infrastructure. Orbital aims to address AI's energy crisis by deploying satellites in sun-synchronous orbits 1,200 miles above Earth, running entirely on continuous solar power whilst using radiative cooling to dissipate heat. Each satellite will house Nvidia-powered GPU clusters designed for AI inference workloads, with latency comparable to terrestrial fibre connections at 20 to 40 milliseconds. The company is opening Factory-1, a research facility in Los Angeles, to manufacture its compute satellites. Rather than attempting repairs in orbit, Orbital will replace satellites at end-of-life with controlled deorbit and burn-up on reentry.