Satlyt raises $8 million to push shared AI compute into orbit

The funding backs software meant to let satellites share compute instead of each carrying its own AI hardware.

Satlyt has raised an $8 million seed round to build software that lets satellites share compute for AI and other workloads, rather than trying to launch its own orbital data centers. The company, based in Sunnyvale and Nairobi, was founded by Rama Afullo after he worked in Google’s cloud business and briefly at SpaceX’s Starlink network, and its software is set to fly on a SpaceX launch on Thursday. Satlyt has already run two demo missions, including one with Google DeepMind’s Gemma model on a Momentus spacecraft that reduced a transmission about onboard software errors by more than 60%. Its next milestone is to prove it can link two satellites into a shared cloud next year, with the goal of becoming a third-party compute provider for spacecraft builders.