Tech company Starcloud announced on X on Monday that it has successfully raised a total of $170 million as the company continues with its efforts to launch data centers in space, an announcement that received a lot of support on X from the local community.
TechCrunch was the first to cover the update.
The NVIDIA-backed startup raised the funds in a Series A funding round, giving it a valuation of $1.1 billion.
The update comes after Starcloud’s CEO Philip Johnston said the company could start mining Bitcoin from space using the Starcloud-2 satellite.
CEO Philip Johnston took to X to announce the fundraising round, saying the funds are to be used to develop its third satellite, which will be an attempt at reducing inference costs in comparison to earth-based data centers, which run up high energy expenses.
Starcloud has already developed its first satellite, called the Starcloud-1.
Benchmark and EQT Ventures were leading investors for the round. New investors were Macquarie Capital, SevenSevenSix, Manhattan West, Adjacent, Carya, GSBackers, and Harpoon. Existing investors included NFX, NebularVC, YCombinator, Fuse VC, Soma Capital, 3Capital Partners, Wyld VC, Tiny VC, and Taurus Ventures.