Lumen Orbit closed one of the biggest rounds from Y Combinator’s last cohort

Lumen Orbit has closed an oversubscribed, eight-figure seed round of more than $10 million, making it one of, if not the, hottest deal of the most recent Y Combinator batch, a source familiar with the details told TechCrunch.

The Redmond, Washington-based startup is pursuing a moonshot idea to build a network of data centers in space that can scale to a gigawatt capacity and be used to train large AI models. Lumen Orbit declined to comment.

The company went through YC’s 2024 summer batch and garnered a significant amount of attention from VCs, multiple VCs told TC. This interest led to an extremely competitive deal process for the startup’s seed round.

While Lumen has a lofty mission, the company seems to be making notable progress already. It was founded earlier this year and is planning to launch its demonstrator satellite in 2025 in partnership with Nvidia’s Inception program.

It’s not surprising that a company looking to build data centers in space would garner a lot of interest. There’s such a big scramble to power AI that companies like Microsoft, Google and Amazon are inking deals with nuclear power plants. Data centers are expected to consume 9% of overall energy consumption in the U.S. by 2030.

Lumen isn’t the only company looking to solve the potential data center crisis, nor is it the only one looking to take the issue to the great beyond. Lonestar Data Holdings is another that has raised $5.8 million and plans to build data centers on the moon.

Venture capitalists recently told TechCrunch that regardless of the data center solution, customer adoption is likely going to be tough for these startups. Still, VCs love to bet on companies with original solutions to big problems.

Lumen was founded in January 2024 by Philip Johnston, CEO, Ezra Feilden, CTO, and Adi Oltean, chief engineer. The startup had previously raised a $2.4 million pre-seed round in March that was led by Nebular with participation from Everywhere Ventures, Tiny VC and Sequoia among others.

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