The Alphabet spinout orchestrating satellite networks with AI just raised $100 million—and its technology may determine who controls the next generation of global communications.
Chris Taylor spent years in the Marine Corps before pivoting to defense technology. Now he's building something that sounds like science fiction: a system that uses artificial intelligence to choreograph laser beams bouncing between satellites, aircraft, and ground stations across Earth and low orbit.
His company, Aalyria, announced a $100 million Series B on February 23, 2026, at a post-money valuation of $1.3 billion. Battery Ventures and J2 Ventures co-led the round, with DYNE Ventures—a maritime and defense-focused firm—joining in. It's a significant milestone for the Livermore, California-based outfit, which Google quietly spun out less than four years ago with a trove of intellectual property dating back to Project Loon and earlier experiments.
The timing isn't coincidental. SpaceX has already deployed more than 9,000 space lasers across its Starlink constellation, moving 42 petabytes of data daily. Competitors are scrambling to catch up, and everyone needs sophisticated orchestration software to make these optical networks actually work. That's where Aalyria comes in.
"Aalyria is foundational in next-generation communications architectures," said Michael Brown, general partner at Battery Ventures, who is joining the company's board. Battery had just closed $3.25 billion in fresh funds the week prior—a war chest aimed squarely at AI infrastructure opportunities. Leading Aalyria's round signals where the smart money sees things heading.
The Google Pedigree
Alphabet officially spun out Aalyria in September 2022, transferring nearly a decade's worth of patents, physical assets, and research initially developed within Google X and at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. The lineage traces back to some of Alphabet's more audacious moonshots, including high-altitude balloons meant to beam internet to remote regions. Alphabet kept a minority stake, perhaps hedging that the technology might prove more valuable outside its walls.
Taylor, the former Govini chief executive, now runs the company alongside Dr. Brian Barritt as CTO. Barritt previously led the Spacetime project inside Alphabet and logged time at NASA before that. It's a team built for complexity—equal parts Silicon Valley ambition and government contract fluency.
Two Products, One Vision
Aalyria's business rests on two pillars. The first, Spacetime, is an AI-driven orchestration platform that creates what the company calls a "digital twin" of Earth and space. It optimizes routing, antenna scheduling, and spectrum allocation across satellites, aircraft, ships, and ground stations—treating the whole mess as one giant, heterogeneous network. Customers can deploy it as single-tenant instances in the cloud, on-premises, or in air-gapped environments, a flexibility that matters when you're dealing with defense contractors and classified systems.
The second product, Tightbeam, is where things get visually impressive. These coherent free-space optical communications terminals—think: highly advanced laser transceivers—can push 100 Gbps per wavelength through more than 100 kilometers of atmosphere. Aalyria claims ground-to-air links approaching 200 kilometers in testing. The terminals come in both fixed and gimballed configurations, designed to plug directly into Spacetime for automated link establishment and routing.
In other words: the lasers talk to each other, and the AI figures out the best path for your data packets. Simple, in theory. Fiendishly complex in practice.
Customers Across Two Worlds
Aalyria has been quietly racking up contracts. On the commercial side, Telesat selected Spacetime in November 2023 for a 10-plus-year agreement to manage routing and customer traffic across its Lightspeed LEO constellation. Rivada Space Networks signed on to use Spacetime for its planned 600-satellite laser-linked network. Intelsat committed to a memorandum of understanding, backed with financial support, to advance multi-orbit connectivity efforts.
The government side tells a parallel story. The Air Force Research Laboratory's RAPID office tapped Aalyria in January 2026 to evaluate Spacetime for the Space Data Network Experimentation program, part of the broader STAR-FISH initiative. The European Space Agency and UK Space Agency contracted the company in December 2023 to develop an O-RAN-compliant orchestration platform for 5G and 6G non-terrestrial networks—work that prompted Aalyria to establish a London headquarters.
There are also partnerships with defense integrator Leidos, combining Spacetime with network protection solutions for DISA-class critical networks, and with Second Front Systems to make the platform available in IL4 and IL5 government environments through the Game Warden platform. The dual-use nature of the technology—serving both satellite operators and Pentagon customers—has become Aalyria's calling card.
Why Orchestration Matters Now
Here's the thing about laser-linked satellite constellations: they're only as good as the software directing traffic. Optical inter-satellite links offer massive bandwidth advantages over traditional radio frequency communications, but they require line-of-sight connections that constantly shift as satellites orbit Earth. Managing thousands of these links in real time, while routing around weather, optimizing for latency, and accommodating different customer priorities? That demands serious computational horsepower and algorithmic sophistication.
Spacetime's integration partnerships extend its capabilities. Keysight Technologies brings 5G non-terrestrial testing. LeoLabs adds space situational awareness. Antaris contributes constellation simulation. Each partnership plugs another variable into the digital twin, making the orchestration more robust.
The broader industry momentum is undeniable. Partnerships between companies like Kepler, TESAT, and Airbus signal a collective march toward multi-orbit optical networks. These systems need something like Spacetime to function at scale—which explains why investors are paying attention.
Follow the Money
Battery Ventures' involvement is particularly telling. The firm has been aggressive in backing AI infrastructure plays, and optical networking sits at the intersection of several trends: the explosion of data traffic, the proliferation of LEO constellations, and the Pentagon's push toward Joint All-Domain Command and Control architectures that require seamless connectivity across land, sea, air, and space.
J2 Ventures, which backed Aalyria's Series A in 2022 alongside Accel and Housatonic, doubled down this round. DYNE's participation underscores growing investor appetite for dual-use technologies that can navigate both commercial satellite markets and defense procurement cycles.
The $1.3 billion valuation feels ambitious but not outlandish, given the contracts already in hand and the market Aalyria is targeting. Whether it can execute at the scale these customers demand—well, that's the next chapter. Taylor and his team have the technology and the funding. Now comes the hard part: delivering systems that work in the real world, where weather doesn't cooperate, satellites fail, and military customers demand five-nines reliability.
For now, though, Aalyria has something valuable: a head start in a race that's just beginning. And in the business of space infrastructure, being first often matters more than being perfect.
