Building and launching the first satellite on a $2.5M pre-seed

Yeah, that's a good question. It's quite a CapEx-heavy business at the beginning. There's a few approaches — one: spend enormous CapEx building something elaborate, then launch it and hope it works. If it doesn't, you shut down.

The other is you launch every year incrementally. We've taken the second approach — launching incrementally.

First launch is going up in November this year — first H100s onboard, about a hundred times more powerful GPU compute than has been in space before. Second one going up in October next year.

We'll have the first Blackwell architecture from Nvidia. That one will be the first to provide a commercial service. We want to generate cash from the second satellite onwards.

Also to be fair, we're doing it cheaply. We raised a $2.5M pre-seed and the whole first satellite was designed, built, and will launch for that $2.5M — dirt cheap compared to any other space startup.

The second one we can do with the seed money we raised. We always aim to have enough cash to survive the next two launches. Right now we have cash through mid 2027.

We'll basically try to raise after the first launch. If there's a failure, we're not totally screwed — we have enough cash to get through to the next one. Our investors are supportive because iterating quickly de-risks it a lot.

In this process, I assume you already have prospects or people you collaborate with. Could you open the door on how you do launches — how people get convinced to do this together with Star Cloud?