Starcloud YC Application
Starcloud went through Y Combinator in the Summer 2024 batch as a Industrials company. Below: what the company does, who founded it, and its application to YC, reconstructed question by question in the real YC form.
- YC batch
- Summer 2024
- Industry
- IndustrialsAviation and Space
- Team size
- 12
- Status
- Active
- Launched
- 2024
Founders
Philip JohnstonFounder/CEO
Ezra FeildenFounder
Adi OlteanFounder
What Starcloud does
Starcloud is building data centers in space, initially to provide GPU compute to other satellites, and later to address the rapidly growing demand for energy caused by the deployment of AI. Falling launch costs give Starcloud access to abundant energy, radiative cooling, and the ability to rapidly scale in space. In November 2025, just 21 months after founding, Starcloud launched its first satellite, Starcloud-1 to space. This has an Nvidia H100, which is 100x more powerful GPU than has ever been operated in space before. With this, they became the first entity to train an LLM in space and the first to run a version of Gemini in space. Starcloud will soon also run high-powered inference on Capella SAR data on orbit for the first time. Starcloud is launching its second satellite in October 2026, which will have 100x the power generation of the first and generate more cash than it costs to build and launch. Starcloud expects that within 10 years, most new data centers will be being built in space for the energy. In March 2026, Starcloud raised a $170M Series A led by Benchmark, becoming the fastest unicorn in YC history, just 17 months after demo day.
Starcloud's YC application, reconstructed
Y Combinator application
Starcloud, Summer 2024 batch. The real form questions, answered from public data.
- Founders2
- Company7
- Progress7
- Idea4
- Equity3
- Curious2
- Batch Preference1
Company
Starcloud
Data centers in space
We build and operate data centers in space starting with satellites that provide GPU compute to other satellites. Our first satellite runs an Nvidia H100 GPU in orbit, powering machine learning workloads including training large language models and running inference on satellite data. As launch costs decrease, we scale these space-based data centers to meet AI's growing energy demand.
We live in Seattle, Washington, and the company will remain based there after YC.
Seattle has the engineering talent we need and proximity to aerospace partners. The founders already live here, so it's a natural base for our hard tech work.
21 more answers in the full application
Founders, Progress, Idea, Equity, Curious, Batch Preference are in the full version. Create a free account to open it in YC Insights, next to every other YC batch.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is this the real Starcloud YC application?
No. Y Combinator keeps submitted applications private. This is a reconstruction: the real YC form questions, answered from Starcloud's public data (launch notes, founder backgrounds, product description). It shows how a company like Starcloud would present itself to YC, not the text they submitted.
What YC batch was Starcloud in?
Starcloud was part of the Y Combinator Summer 2024 batch.
Who founded Starcloud?
Starcloud was founded by Philip Johnston, Ezra Feilden, Adi Oltean.
What does Starcloud do?
Data centers in space
How do I read the full reconstructed application?
Create a free Round Funded account. The full 26-answer version of Starcloud's application, and every other YC batch, is in YC Insights.
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