Satlyt, founded by Rama Afullo, has raised an $8 million seed round to build software that runs AI models on satellites. Afullo, a Kenyan American engineer, previously worked in Google’s cloud computing business and spent part of 2024 at SpaceX’s Starlink communications network. He says he tried to pitch orbital data centers internally at both companies and was turned down each time, so he left SpaceX and co-founded Satlyt, headquartered in Sunnyvale, California, and Nairobi. Unlike SpaceX, Google, and startups like Starcloud and Cowboy Space Company, Satlyt is not building its own spacecraft. It is building a horizontal software layer that works across many companies’ satellites; Afullo compares it to VMware and Snowflake, platforms that let users run complex software without worrying about 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,” he said.

Satlyt‘s initial focus is operational efficiency for spacecraft, which typically rely on flight controllers on the ground to solve problems. Downlink — sending data back to Earth — is expensive and often slow, so making decisions on the spacecraft can produce real savings, whether by resolving anomalies in orbit or processing sensor readings on board. The company has already flown its software on two demonstration missions. Earlier this year, Satlyt deployed Google DeepMind’s Gemma AI model on a spacecraft operated by Momentus. The model cut the size of a transmission about onboard software errors by more than 60%, an efficiency gain that Afullo says can save hundreds of thousands of dollars per satellite each year.

This week’s launch on a SpaceX rocket puts Satlyt‘s software on a spacecraft built by TakeMe2Space, an Indian startup that makes computing hardware for satellites. The mission has three customers: NASA, which is paying Satlyt to test protocols for cloud computing in space; Stellerian, a startup focused on space surveillance and tracking objects in orbit, which wants to test image processing workloads; and TakeMe2Space itself, which wants to show its satellite can host other companies’ software. The launch also carries the first prototype for Google’s space data center effort, Project Suncatcher, and comes after SpaceX has gone all-in on orbital data centers.

Satlyt‘s next project is a shared computing system — a cloud — spanning two different satellites, which it expects to attempt next year. If that works, the company would become a third-party cloud provider in orbit. “The way to think about it is that we turn your satellite into a revenue-generating managed service,” Afullo said. His goal is to be live on 20% of satellites by the end of the decade, when he expects virtually every spacecraft builder to be putting GPUs and similar advanced processors in their satellites. “If you’re putting up a satellite without putting up a GPU on it, at the very least, you’re doing yourself a disservice, right?”

Non Sibi Ventures, a Houston-based firm, led the seed round; partner Bernard Harris, who served as a NASA astronaut for more than 20 years, helped ground the firm’s conviction in a space-based business. The investment also rested on Satlyt not depending on the highest-octane vision of space data centers, which face uncertain economics and a launch bottleneck. “We don’t need data centers in space for Rama to be wildly successful, right?” partner Kent Lucas told TechCrunch. “It can just be driven by the number of satellites going up.” For now, few high-powered GPUs are in orbit, so the most likely near-term opportunity lies in the operational-efficiency workloads Satlyt is already pursuing. Satlyt is among the startups vetted by TechCrunch and appearing at Disrupt as part of the Battlefield competition in San Francisco this week.