How an e-scooter founder raised $5 million to build space data centers
Original reporting by TechCrunch
SpaceX’s transformative impact extends beyond rockets, fundamentally reshaping venture capital’s appetite for ambitious, long-term space ventures. This shift is so profound that a talented founder with no prior aerospace experience can now secure significant funding for a space data center company. Enter Orbital, a new firm that recently emerged from a16z’s Speedrun accelerator with a $5 million seed round. Leading Orbital is CEO Euwyn Poon, who previously founded and sold e-scooter company Spin, now turning his entrepreneurial gaze to orbit.
Orbital's pitch is compelling: as demand for AI compute skyrockets, Earth-bound solutions face limitations. Why not leverage space for limitless solar power and limited environmental reviews? The primary obstacle, however, remains the prohibitive cost of launching heavy infrastructure into orbit. Like many competitors, Orbital is making a colossal bet on SpaceX’s Starship, expecting it to drastically reduce launch economics and make their vision economically feasible.
The Strategy Shift For now, Orbital is laying groundwork. They're preparing for a demo flight, testing Nvidia Blackwell chips on a partner satellite to validate radiation shielding and thermal management. Their ultimate goal is an ambitious constellation of 10,000 satellites, aiming to provide a distributed gigawatt of computing power. This long-term play, once considered "crazy," reflects a new era where venture firms are increasingly comfortable backing decade-long, multi-billion-dollar aerospace projects, fueled by the energy in today's capital markets and the insatiable demand for AI.
While Orbital's success hinges on Starship's promised economics, its very existence, and the deep-pocketed backing it commands, underscores a dramatic shift in venture capital's appetite for audacious, long-horizon space ventures. The willingness to invest billions over a decade into projects like orbiting data centers, a concept deemed "crazy 10 years ago," illustrates a profound re-evaluation of risk and return in the era of AI and advanced space capabilities. It validates SpaceX's catalytic role in normalizing previously unimaginable timelines and capital requirements for private aerospace endeavors.
The New Frontier of Compute
This burgeoning field represents more than just a novel location for compute; it signals a fundamental rethinking of AI infrastructure itself. Deploying thousands of GPUs in orbit promises to address terrestrial limitations—such as energy availability, cooling challenges, and even regulatory friction—while potentially democratizing access to powerful AI models and accelerating scientific discovery by placing compute closer to observation points. The competition, from established players like Blue Origin to nimble startups building their own rockets, highlights the perceived urgency and immense market opportunity.
Ultimately, the rise of companies like Orbital signifies a future where computation is geographically unbound and energy-agnostic. This transformation could alleviate significant pressure on Earth’s resources while enabling new applications and paradigms for artificial intelligence. It marks a pivotal moment where private enterprise, empowered by a maturing space economy and unprecedented venture capital comfort with "deep tech" timelines, is poised to lead foundational infrastructure projects of global and even interplanetary significance, fundamentally altering the economic and technological landscape of AI for decades to come.