Philip Johnston is the Co-Founder and CEO of Starcloud, a pioneering space technology company building orbital data centers to solve AI's most pressing infrastructure constraint: energy.

Born in Guildford, UK, Philip earned a First-class BSc in Applied Mathematics from the University of Nottingham, an MA from Columbia University, an MBA from Wharton, and an MPA in National Security and Technology from Harvard University, where he was student body president.

Philip is a second-time founder and CFA Charterholder who previously co-founded Opontia, a CEEMEA-focused digital brand aggregator that raised $62M, and spent years at McKinsey and Company working on satellite projects for national space agencies.

At Starcloud, Philip led the team from a $3M pre-seed round to launching Starcloud-1 in November 2025, the first satellite to deploy an NVIDIA H100 GPU in orbit and successfully train a large language model in space.

Starcloud raised a $170M Series A led by Benchmark and EQT Ventures at a $1.1B valuation, becoming the fastest Y Combinator graduate to reach unicorn status, just 17 months after its demo day.