I am super excited to share that @Starcloud_ has raised a $170M Series A at a $1.1bn valuation to fuel our development of data centers in space 🚀 The round comes after the successful deployment of our first satellite, Starcould-1, a few months ago, which had the first @NVIDIA H100 on board and was the first to train an LLM in space. The funds will be used to develop our third satellite, which aims to be cost-competitive with Earth-based data centers in terms of AI inference cost. The round was led by @Benchmark and @EQT Ventures, and we are excited to welcome Benchmark GP, @Chetanp Puttagunta, to our board. We are also excited to welcome other new investors, including the world's largest infrastructure fund, @Macquarie Capital, @SevenSevenSix 7️⃣7️⃣6️⃣, Manhattan West, Adjacent, Carya, GSBackers, and Harpoon. We are very grateful for the continued support of existing investors, including @NFX, @NebularVC, @YCombinator, @FUSE_VC, @Soma_Capital, 3Capital Partners, Wyld VC, Tiny VC, and Taurus Ventures. Onwards!

For the last several months, we’ve been working on the design of our @Starcloud_-3 distributed constellation of 200kW inference nodes in dawn-dusk sun-synchronous orbit, providing many gigawatts of low-cost AI compute. It seems we’re not alone! 🙌

.@Elyos_AI has raised a $13m Series A to build AI agents for the trades and field services industry. Elyos helps plumbers, electricians, HVAC and facilities teams automate customer communications. Congrats to the team on the raise!

I did office hours with a startup yesterday that I ended up advising to (a) decrease their growth rate and (b) spend the money they've raised faster by hiring more people and paying them high salaries. Possibly the first time I've ever told a startup this.