How an e-scooter founder raised $5 million to build space data centers

Here’s one metrics to track SpaceX’s IPO later this week: The company has changed the venture industry’s view of space as being so long-term, capital-intensive that a talented founder with no space experience can fund a space data center company.

Orbital, a new company that emerged in May from a16z Speedrun’s startup accelerator program with a $5 million seed round, is the latest company to promise to do inference in space — once the Starship is flying regularly. Other investors include Basis Set, Human Element, Wayfinder, Antler, Anti Fund, Ascent, Rubik, Zero Knowledge Ventures, LYVC, Feld Ventures, New Legacy, FNDR, UpHonest, and Asterisk.

Founder and CEO Euwyn Poon previously founded e-scooter company Spin in 2017 and sold it to Ford a year later, joining the auto giant. When he was ready to start a new company, a16z’s Speedrun was eager to join in, according to partner Andrew Chen, who told TechCrunch that Boone worked through several ideas before landing on space data centers.

You are familiar with the playing field. There is an insatiable demand for AI computing, and its deployment is slow on the ground. Why not head into space for unlimited sunshine and limited environmental reviews? The main problem is the harsh economics of launching things into orbit, which currently leaves the feasibility study unable to close.

Orbital, like many of its competitors, is betting that SpaceX will discover its Starship rocket and offer it to commercial customers. “We will reach full scale when the spacecraft comes online,” Boone explained. The price of the Falcon 9 rocket, and the current state of the technology, “makes this not economically feasible.”

Right now, Poon and her company — which includes about a dozen people in Los Angeles, with experience at Amazon LEO, SpaceX, and Northrop Grumman — are setting up a test flight that will see the company launch an Nvidia Blackwell chip on a partner satellite to test Orbital’s radiation protection and thermal management technology. In 2028, the company hopes to launch the first data-processing spacecraft using Nvidia’s Space-1 Vera Rubin-class GPUs.

At that point, the company wants to start doing partial inference work, which will allow it to generate revenue with each satellite launched. This is a similar path to rival data center startup Starcloud, which already has a GPU in orbit and plans to launch more of them to generate income until Starship enables them to deploy its full range.

Orbital’s goal is to deploy 10,000 satellites providing distributed gigawatts of computing power, with each satellite providing 100 kilowatts of power. By comparison, Elon Musk said SpaceX expects its AI satellites to produce up to 150 kilowatts, and Starcloud expects to send a larger 200-kilowatt spacecraft to power the chips.

Some companies can’t wait for Starship. Cowboy Space Company, another a16z-backed space data center startup, recently decided to start building its own rockets. Jeff Bezos’ space company Blue Origin also announced plans to launch data centers into space using the New Glenn launch vehicle.

Boone is confident that the breadth of demand for AI will allow many companies to succeed. “There are a lot of paths for companies to follow in our space,” he told TechCrunch, before laying out a range of options that include companies seeking to pursue different AI workloads, designs and concepts on what a space data center looks like.

Chen said Poon’s experience in scaling the company, which has deployed 250,000 motorcycles in 100 cities, shows that he is capable of managing the difficult task of building an airline. In the long term, a project like this could take a decade and $5 billion or more, but Chen said investment firms feel more comfortable with timelines like that.

“This kind of thing would have seemed crazy 10 years ago when we were all building mobile apps,” he said. “Starting in 2026 allows you to take advantage of all the energy and excitement happening in the capital markets.”

Boone found his way into the space data center business via a circuitous route. After leaving Ford, he purchased an Nvidia A100 machine at great expense, put it in a Santa Clara data center and offers open-weight models. This direct experience convinced him of the importance of providing computing services in the age of artificial intelligence.

Now he just has to put a few thousand GPUs into space.