Sophia Space Closes $10 Million Seed Round to Accelerate Orbital Edge Computing

Sophia Space, building orbital compute and data centers, solar powered, space-cooled, AI-ready, led by Rob DeMillo, Dr. Leon Alkalai, Brian Monnin, and Jim Chase, has raised a $10 million seed round, led by Alpha Funds, KDDI Green Partners Fund, and Unlock Venture Partners. 

Founded by former NASA/JPL Fellow Leon Alkalai, Sophia Space is redefining in-orbit computing with a scalable, space-native thermal management approach. Its technology is built for the extreme thermal, power, and radiation conditions of space, enabling AI, cloud, and scientific workloads to run reliably and at scale beyond Earth.

Leon Alkalai said Sophia Space is building scalable supercomputing in orbit to process Earth observation data in real time. By reducing bandwidth and latency, it enables faster decision-making for defense, disaster response, maritime, and energy monitoring missions.

Rob DeMillo, Co-founder and CEO of Sophia Space, said that moving high-performance compute into orbit is a competitive separator. The company’s TILE modules, powered by patented cooling technology, enable AI to scale in ways unmatched by existing systems.

Building on its proprietary radiative cooling technology, Sophia Space is advancing its modular TILE platform to enable in-orbit AI inference, edge processing, and data-intensive workloads across civil, commercial, and defense missions.

Rob DeMillo added that the Seed round is not just about building compute modules, but about laying the infrastructure for the next era of space-based AI and data processing at Sophia Space.

J.D. Russell, Founder and CEO of Alpha Funds, said Sophia Space represents a compelling deep-tech opportunity: a space-native platform solving thermal control, power efficiency, and reliability challenges so AI inference can occur where data is generated. Alpha Funds is supporting the team in scaling the TILE architecture into mission-ready orbital edge computing for civil, commercial, and national security customers.

The funding will enable Sophia Space to hire top engineering talent, further mature the TILE platform, and build strategic partnerships across the orbital computing ecosystem, addressing bottlenecks in satellite operations, space stations, and emerging commercial orbital data centers.