Lumen Orbit has closed an oversubscribed eight-figure seed round of more than $10 million, sources with knowledge of the details told TechCrunch. If that happens, this would be one of the hottest deals in the latest Y Combinator batch, if not the hottest.
The Redmond, Washington-based startup is pursuing the moonshot idea of building a network of data centers in space that can scale to gigawatts of capacity and be used to train large-scale AI models. Lumen Orbit declined to comment.
Multiple VCs told TC that the company passed YC's Summer 2024 batch and received significant attention from VCs. This interest led to a highly competitive deal process for the startup's seed round.
Lumen has a lofty mission, but it appears to have already made significant progress. The company was founded earlier this year and plans to launch a demonstration satellite in 2025 in partnership with NVIDIA's Inception program.
It's no wonder there's so much interest from companies looking to build data centers in space. There's a huge race to power AI, with companies like Microsoft, Google, and Amazon signing deals with nuclear power plants. Data centers are expected to consume 9% of total US energy consumption by 2030.
Lumen isn't the only company trying to solve a potential data center crisis. And Lumen isn't the only company trying to take this issue further into the world. Lone Star Data Holdings also raised $5.8 million and plans to build a data center on the moon.
Venture capitalists recently told TechCrunch that customer adoption will likely be tough for these startups, regardless of the data center solution. Still, VCs prefer to bet on companies with unique solutions to big problems.
Lumen was founded in January 2024 by CEO Philip Johnston, CTO Ezra Feilden, and Chief Engineer Adi Oltean. The startup previously raised $2.4 million in a pre-seed round led by Nebular in March with participation from Everywhere Ventures, Tiny VC, Sequoia and others.