YC’s fastest unicorn: Starcloud
Starcloud raised $170M in a Series A at a $1.1B valuation — just 17 months after YC demo day, making it the fastest‑ever YC unicorn (led by Benchmark and EQT Ventures) ( ). The space‑data‑center startup says it will add two more satellites as it scales, underscoring investor appetite at the AI‑satellite/cloud intersection (techcrunch.com).
Starcloud was founded in 2024 by Philip Johnston, Ezra Feilden and Adi Oltean and is headquartered in Redmond, Washington. (ycombinator.com) Its first satellite, Starcloud‑1, reached orbit on Nov. 2, 2025 aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 and carried an NVIDIA H100 GPU in a test spacecraft weighing roughly 60 kg (about 130 lb). (datacenterfrontier.com) Starcloud‑1 executed on‑orbit AI work: the company says it ran Google’s Gemma model and completed the first reported training of a small LLM in space. (cnbc.com) The recent financing brings the startup’s cumulative capital raised to about $200 million since launch, according to coverage tracking the company’s funding history. (techcrunch.com) Starcloud’s roadmap calls for a follow‑on satellite in October 2026 that the company says will produce roughly 100x the power of Starcloud‑1 and is designed to begin covering its own build-and-launch costs. (ycombinator.com) Alongside Benchmark and EQT Ventures, the broader cap table named in reporting includes investors such as Macquarie Capital, NFX, 776 Ventures and Y Combinator among other institutional and angel backers. (markets.financialcontent.com)
