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Lumen Orbit , a startup looking to make information center in blank space , was able to close its recent seed round of drinks in mere day amid intense investor interest .
The Redmond , Washington - based company closed on an $ 11 million seminal fluid round at a $ 40 million rating , confirming priorTechCrunch reportingthat the company had lift a competitive twofold - digit round as one of the buzziest startups out ofY Combinator ’s Summer 2024 batch . The deal was led by NFX — NFX worldwide partner Morgan Beller will fall in the company ’s board — with involution from VCs , include Fuse . VC , Soma Capital , and scout store from Andreessen Horowitz and Sequoia , among others .
Lumen Orbit co - laminitis and CEO Philip Johnston differentiate TechCrunch that due to the high investor demand — more than 200 hundred VCs attain out to the startup — the ship’s company has since open up up another SAFE troll on top of it , at a higher valuation , to let more investors in .
That ’s quite a caboodle of pursuit for a ship’s company that was founded only in January .
The company is building orbital data centers that are made up of pods , which can sustain compute and can be brought up individually , attaching to magnanimous solar panels in quad in clusters ( concept image above ) . Lumen ’s destination is to establish multi - gigawatt compute clusters by the destruction of the 10 . These data centers will use a mellow - bandwidth optical laser to send information back down to Earth .
If successful , Lumen ’s technical school could help AI company scale without the data middle size and might restrictions they have on Earth and at a fraction of the money it take to run a data heart and soul on the solid ground .
“ Instead of paying $ 140 million for electrical energy , you’re able to give $ 10 million for a launch and solar , ” Johnston sound out .
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The fellowship is planning to set in motion a sales demonstrator satellite in May that will include Nvidia ’s terrestrial GPUs . It plan to launch another exam orbiter that ’s 100x more powerful the follow yr . Johnston tell that they want to launch something at least once a year .
“ A lot of outer space companies take five years to set in motion ; we are launch it in 18 calendar month , ” Johnston said . “ We ’d rather launch frequently with smaller alteration than wait five years and launch with a ton of incremental change . ”
Johnston said he and his co - founder , Ezra Feilden , CTO , got the idea for the company from their time working in the space industry . Feilden has a decade of experience working on satellite figure at companies such as Airbus Defense and Oxford Space Systems . Johnston work with national quad organizations in the Middle East on their satellite task as a consultant at McKinsey . He also is a former founder of Opontia , a startup that scaled digital brands in the Middle East and was acquired at the ending of 2023 .
As the cost to launch satellites gets increasingly cheaper , Johnston said they initially thought that space solar would be an interesting segment of the market . The puerility friends soon realized that the amount of energy need to send the solar power back to Earth made it more of a tussle than it was worth .
But data centers are different because they are n’t producing Department of Energy to post back down to Earth . rather , they are plume up the sun ’s energy and largely staying put . Building data point centers also lease tending of the cooling problem because deep space is of course insensate .
When Johnston and Feilden got the mind , they were introduced to Adi Oltean , an engineer at SpaceX at the fourth dimension who had been independently thinking of this idea as well . Oltean link the innovation team about a calendar month after the company launched as atomic number 27 - founder and chief engineer .
Building datum centers in space , and in the bass sea , have become an increase part of the conversation on how to help AI musical scale to its full potentiality . Multiple people in the AI community , from Bill Gates to Sam Altman to Elon Musk , have all brag this as a potential result to AI ’s uprise data point heart and soul and powerfulness problem .
Axiom Spaceis also working to develop orbital datum centers , but the arena is n’t crowded — at least for now . But that will likely change as more AI industry professionals seem thirsty for this type of invention .
Lumen ’s military mission is ambitious , as the success of the party relies on the costs to launch satellites continuing to add up down — and delay that way . But if successful , it could help AI scale at the pace it wants and perhaps need to , while also decrease some of the tech ’s effects on Earth ’s mood .
