Rama Afullo had a vision that most of his former employers were not ready to hear. The Kenyan American engineer, who had built experience inside Google's cloud computing division before a brief role at SpaceX's Starlink satellite internet network in 2024, became convinced that running computing workloads directly in orbit represented a significant and largely ignored opportunity. When he brought that idea to leadership at both companies, the answer was the same: no.
Rather than shelve the concept, Afullo left SpaceX and co-founded a new venture called Satlyt, headquartered in Sunnyvale, California, with an additional office in Nairobi, Kenya. The company is building software that enables satellites to share the burden of large-scale computing tasks in orbit. Satlyt has now closed an $8 million seed funding round, marking an early but meaningful vote of confidence in the orbital computing sector.
The timing of the company's emergence is notable. SpaceX has since committed heavily to the concept of orbital data centers, and Satlyt's software is scheduled to launch this week aboard a SpaceX rocket - flying alongside the first hardware prototype for Google's own space-based data center initiative, known as Project Suncatcher.
Software, Not Spacecraft
What distinguishes Satlyt from competitors such as SpaceX, Google, Starcloud, and Cowboy Space Company is that Afullo's team has no plans to manufacture its own satellites. Instead, the company is focused purely on software - specifically, software designed to run artificial intelligence models directly on satellites already in orbit. Afullo has drawn comparisons between Satlyt's approach and the business models of enterprise software firms like VMware and Snowflake, which allow customers to run sophisticated applications without needing to manage the physical infrastructure underneath.
In Afullo's framing, companies like SpaceX building proprietary orbital data centers are akin to Apple building a closed hardware-software ecosystem. Satlyt, by contrast, is positioning itself as the Android equivalent - an open, horizontally integrated platform designed to operate across satellites from many different manufacturers and operators.
Early Demonstrations Show Real Savings
Satlyt has already completed two demonstration missions in orbit. Its initial focus centers on improving operational efficiency for satellites, which have traditionally relied on ground-based flight controllers to diagnose and resolve problems as they arise. Transmitting data back to Earth - a process known as downlinking - is both costly and slow. Running AI inference directly on the spacecraft can reduce that dependency, whether the task involves identifying anomalies autonomously or processing sensor data before it ever reaches the ground.
Earlier this year, Satlyt deployed Google DeepMind's Gemma AI model aboard a satellite operated by Momentus. The on-orbit AI was able to reduce the volume of data transmitted about software errors by more than 60 percent. Afullo estimates that efficiencies of this kind can translate into savings of hundreds of thousands of dollars per satellite annually - a figure that becomes significant when multiplied across a growing constellation.
This week's launch will carry Satlyt's software aboard a spacecraft built by TakeMe2Space, an Indian startup that develops computing hardware for use in orbit. The mission serves three distinct customers simultaneously. NASA is funding tests of cloud computing protocols in space. Stellerian, a startup focused on space domain awareness and object tracking in orbit, is using the mission to test image processing workloads. TakeMe2Space itself is using the flight to demonstrate that its satellite platform can host third-party software applications.
Building Toward an Orbital Cloud
The current supply of high-powered graphics processing units in orbit remains extremely limited. For now, the most commercially viable work involves the efficiency-focused applications that Satlyt is already pursuing. However, the company's next major technical milestone is to demonstrate a shared computing environment - effectively a cloud infrastructure - that spans two separate satellites. That experiment is expected to take place sometime in the coming year. If it succeeds, it would lay the groundwork for Satlyt to offer genuine cloud computing services in orbit as a third-party provider to satellite operators and builders.
Afullo describes the long-term proposition for satellite operators in straightforward terms: Satlyt's platform would transform a satellite from a fixed-cost asset into a managed service capable of generating revenue by hosting computing workloads for paying customers.
Investors and the Path Forward
The $8 million seed round was led by Houston-based Non Sibi Ventures. A key figure in the firm's decision to invest was partner Bernard Harris, a former NASA astronaut with more than two decades of service, whose firsthand experience in space operations informed the firm's confidence in Satlyt's direction.
Non Sibi partner Kent Lucas explained that the firm's conviction did not depend on the most ambitious version of the orbital data center thesis playing out. In his view, Satlyt's model is viable even without large-scale space-based data centers becoming a reality, because its growth can simply track the increasing number of satellites being launched each year. The company does not need to wait for a transformational shift in space infrastructure to find customers - it just needs more satellites to go up, and more operators looking to extract value from the computing hardware already aboard them.
Afullo's target is for Satlyt's software to be operating on 20 percent of active satellites by the end of the decade. By that point, he expects that nearly every spacecraft builder will be equipping their satellites with GPUs or comparable advanced processors as a matter of course. In his view, launching a satellite without onboard AI-capable processing will increasingly be seen as a missed opportunity - one that leaves both efficiency gains and potential revenue on the table.
Satlyt is currently participating in a broader startup competition this week in San Francisco, where it is among a field of companies selected for evaluation by industry observers and investors tracking the next wave of space technology ventures.
