Satlyt announced October 1 it has closed an $8 million seed round led by non sibi ventures, pulling together a roster of investors that includes TLcom Capital, Antler, Slauson & Co., Launch Africa Ventures, Enza Capital, and half a dozen others. The pitch: software that transforms ordinary satellites into edge-computing nodes by running artificial intelligence inference in orbit, before data ever touches the ground.
The company, which operates out of both Sunnyvale, California and Nairobi, Kenya, says the fresh capital brings its total raised to "well past $10 million," according to CEO Rama Afullo. Third-party databases clock disclosed funding at $8.0 to $8.3 million. The gap likely reflects NASA contract dollars or earlier undisclosed checks.
What Satlyt sells isn't hardware. It uploads AI models to satellite computers already in space—or queued for launch—to crunch data before transmission. In one demonstration, Google's Gemma 3 model running aboard a Momentus spacecraft reduced diagnostic downlink traffic by roughly 64 percent, according to a DeepMind case study published in August.
"The way to think about it is that we turn your satellite into a revenue-generating managed service," Afullo told TechCrunch.
The startup bills itself as an "Above Cloud Service Provider," a term that positions its software as a neutral layer draped across third-party satellites rather than lashed to proprietary hardware. Afullo likes the Android-to-iPhone analogy: open and horizontally integrated, not vertically stacked.
A pitch that didn't land, twice
Afullo's résumé reads like a tour of the tech industry's space ambitions. He worked as a product manager on SpaceX's Starlink team, managed AI startups at Google Cloud, and before that led Tesla's telecom business across Africa. The orbital compute idea predates Satlyt.
"When I was at SpaceX... I tried to pitch this internally. They said no. When I was at Google... They said no," Afullo said.
So he built it himself. Satlyt's senior leadership includes CTO Nelson Kigen Psenjen, senior space software engineer Leina Moli, and senior space systems engineer Junn Wangari. The company listed eight employees as of this week, according to Fireround.dev.
Already in orbit
Satlyt's software launched aboard a TakeMe2Space spacecraft on October 1, carrying two applications: a NASA-funded test of delay-tolerant networking protocols for edge computing in space, and a commercial space-domain-awareness workload for Stellerian. TakeMe2Space's MOI bus hosts Satlyt's code through an environment called OrbitLab.
NASA awarded the company a Small Business Technology Transfer contract to develop autonomous quality-of-service optimization for mobile edge cloud networks, working alongside the University of Houston. Afullo noted on LinkedIn that Satlyt has collaborated with five NASA centers—Ames, Johnson, Marshall, Goddard, and Glenn—across various proposals.
The startup has also signed memorandums of understanding with the Kenya Space Agency and Angola's GGPEN. Payload reported October 1 that Satlyt inked another MoU with xOrbita and Symphony Space, a fellow orbital data center startup, to explore joint software-defined architectures.
Satlyt plans to use the seed capital to grow its engineering team and scale software deployments across more spacecraft. The goal, perhaps more ambitious than most seed-stage visions, is to coordinate compute tasks across multiple satellites into a shared network. Afullo floated an aspirational target of reaching 30 percent of non-Starlink satellites by decade's end, Payload reported.
"We run orthogonal to essentially every edge-compute box... it actually makes the network stronger," Afullo told the publication.
A crowded sky
The orbital compute field has gotten busy. Ireland's Ubotica raised $11 million and works with NASA and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory on onboard maritime intelligence. Italy's D-Orbit operates Space Cloud Services that run containerized applications on ION carriers. Loft Orbital launched a dedicated AI for Space unit and partnered with JPL on Earth science AI deployments. Poland's KP Labs and Sweden's Unibap also offer onboard data processing stacks.
Google itself launched Project Suncatcher, a prototype orbital data center experiment, aboard the same October 1 SpaceX Transporter-18 mission that carried Satlyt's software, according to a company blog post. Axios reported the mission carried multiple orbital data center experiments, a sign the category is gaining momentum.
Kent Lucas, a partner at non sibi ventures, sees room for multiple winners. "We don't need data centers in space for Rama to be wildly successful... It can just be driven by the number of satellites going up," Lucas told TechCrunch. In Satlyt's press release, he added: "We see a vast opportunity for software to make spacecraft computing more useful."
Satlyt was selected for TechCrunch Disrupt's Battlefield 200 cohort last August, according to the company's blog. For a startup that got turned down twice at the giants, the trajectory has shifted.
