Satlyt Raises $8M to Run AI on Satellites

Satylt, the above cloud service provider, led by Rama Afullo, Nelson Psenjen, and the team, has raised an $8 million seed round.

The Kenyan-American engineer previously worked in Google’s cloud computing business and briefly joined SpaceX’s Starlink team in 2024, where he saw untapped potential for computing in space.

He later co-founded Satlyt, headquartered in Sunnyvale and Nairobi, to build software that enables satellites to share large computing workloads. The company has raised an $8 million seed round, Afullo told TechCrunch.

The timing is notable: SpaceX is now pursuing orbital data centers, while Satlyt’s software is set to launch aboard a SpaceX rocket alongside the first prototype of Google’s Project Suncatcher.

Rather than building spacecraft, Satlyt is developing the software layer for running AI models across satellites, an approach Afullo compares to VMware and Snowflake, which abstract away the underlying infrastructure.

“The folks like SpaceX who are doing orbital data centers, if they are the iPhone, we’ll build Android as a horizontally integrated, open ecosystem,” Rama said. In other words, Satlyt wants to offer software that works across many companies’ satellites.

Satlyt has already flown its software on two demonstration missions, initially targeting operational efficiencies for spacecraft. AI can process sensor data and resolve anomalies onboard, reducing expensive and slow data transfers to Earth.

Earlier this year, Satlyt deployed Google DeepMind’s Gemma model on a Momentus spacecraft, cutting the size of transmissions about software errors by more than 60%, potentially saving hundreds of thousands of dollars per satellite annually.

Its next mission will run Satlyt’s software on a TakeMe2Space spacecraft, with NASA, Stellerian, and TakeMe2Space testing cloud-computing, image-processing, and third-party software workloads.

The longer-term goal is a shared computing system across multiple satellites. Satlyt plans to demonstrate a two-satellite compute cloud next year, potentially creating an orbital cloud infrastructure layer for spacecraft operators.

The company’s $8 million seed round was led by Non Sibi Ventures. Satlyt aims to have its software running on 20% of satellites by the end of the decade.

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