Starcloud was founded on January 1st. On January 2nd, they booked a SpaceX launch, not knowing what they'd put on the rocket.
Still can't get over that they actually did that.
Y Combinator (@ycombinator)
Philip Johnston (@PhilipJohnston) is the co-founder and CEO of @Starcloud_, the company building data centers in space.
In November 2025, Starcloud launched an Nvidia H100 GPU into orbit and trained the first large language model in space. They've since raised $200 million, hit a billion-dollar valuation just 17 months after YC demo day and filed with the FCC to deploy 88,000 more satellites.
In this episode of @LightconePod, Philip walks us through their wild origin story, the engineering challenges behind the Starcloud-1, why they booked a SpaceX launch before they even knew what they were building and how data centers in space make sense both economically and politically.
00:39 — Why Build Data Centers in Space?
01:40 — The Insight That Started Starcloud
04:43 — Launching Starcloud-1
09:45 — The Engineering Behind Data Centers in Orbit
13:49 — Why 100 VCs Said No
16:12 — Book the Launch Before You Build the Product
18:32 — The Roadmap to Commercial Space Compute
21:10 — Building NVIDIA GPUs for Space
23:41 — Raising $170M for a Hard Tech Startup
26:37 — Hiring the World's Best Space Engineers
31:25 — Why AI Compute Is Moving to Space
34:49 — Advice for Hard Tech Founders
Video
— https://nitter.net/ycombinator/status/2085003603727794419#m