Second-time founder building orbital data centers that leverage solar energy and the vacuum of space to power AI workloads. Previously co-founded Opontia — an e-commerce aggregator that raised over $62M and was acquired in 2023 — and worked on satellite projects for national space agencies at McKinsey. In November 2025, the Starcloud team launched the first NVIDIA H100 GPU into orbit and trained the first large language model in space. Philip holds an MPA from Harvard, an MBA from Wharton, and an MA in Applied Mathematics & Theoretical Physics from Columbia. Starcloud (YC S24) has raised ~$21M in seed funding from NFX, NVIDIA, In-Q-Tel, and scout funds from Andreessen Horowitz and Sequoia.
Starcloud is building data centers in space. Their satellites carry NVIDIA GPUs and use solar energy for power and the vacuum of space for cooling, letting them run AI workloads at a fraction of the energy cost of ground-based facilities.
The satellites sit in sun-synchronous orbits where they get sunlight over 95% of the time, so solar panels run near-continuously. In space, heat radiates away naturally without needing water-based cooling towers. That combination cuts energy costs significantly compared to traditional data centers.
AI models need massive amounts of energy to train, and that demand is straining power grids on Earth. Space offers near-unlimited solar energy with zero carbon emissions and no land or water usage. There's also a sovereign cloud angle: data processed in orbit sits outside any nation's territory.
Starcloud (YC S24) raised about $21M in seed funding from NFX, NVIDIA, In-Q-Tel, 468 Capital, and scout funds from a16z and Sequoia. In November 2025, just 21 months after founding, they launched the first NVIDIA H100 GPU into orbit and trained the first large language model in space.
Philip Johnston (CEO) previously co-founded Opontia, an e-commerce aggregator that raised over $62M and was acquired in 2023. He also worked on satellite projects at McKinsey. Ezra Feilden (CTO) spent a decade designing satellites at Airbus and worked on NASA's Lunar Pathfinder. Adi Oltean (Chief Engineer) was a Principal Software Engineer at SpaceX working on Starlink tracking beams, with 20 years at Microsoft and over 25 patents.
They've partnered with Crusoe Cloud to become the first public cloud provider to run workloads in space, with GPU capacity expected in orbit by early 2027. They also partnered with Star Catcher for space-to-space power beaming, which could scale power delivery to up to 10 gigawatts by the early 2030s.
Starcloud-2 launches in October 2026 with roughly 100x the power generation of the first satellite. It will carry multiple H100 chips, NVIDIA Blackwell B200 hardware, and a Crusoe Cloud module. Starcloud-3 will be a 2-ton, 100-kilowatt spacecraft launching on SpaceX Starship.
