Satlyt, a space software company with offices in Nairobi and Sunnyvale, California, has raised an $8 million seed round led by Non Sibi Ventures, TechCrunch reports. The founder, Rama Afullo, is a Kenyan American engineer who worked in Google's cloud business and briefly on SpaceX's Starlink network.
"When I was at SpaceX, I tried to pitch this internally. They said no," Afullo told TechCrunch. He says Google turned the idea down too.
What the software does
Satlyt does not build satellites. It writes software that lets them run AI models on board and share large computing jobs across several spacecraft. Processing data in orbit means less of it has to be sent to the ground, which is slow and expensive, and lets a satellite deal with some faults without waiting for ground control.
Earlier this year Satlyt ran Google DeepMind's Gemma model on a spacecraft operated by Momentus, which cut the size of a transmission about onboard software errors by more than 60%, according to TechCrunch. NASA is a paying customer on its next mission, testing cloud computing in space.
"If they are the iPhone, we'll build Android as a horizontally integrated, open ecosystem," Afullo said of companies that build their own spacecraft and computers together.
