Sophia Space raises $10M seed to demonstrate novel space computers

As space companies scramble to push more advanced chips into orbit, the problem of cooling those high-powered processors is front of mind.

“It’s cold in space… [but] there’s no air flow, so the only way to disperse is to drive,” Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said when asked about space-based data centers during his company’s lead conference call.

Now, Sophia Space has raised $10 million from investors, including Alpha Funds, KDDI Green Partners Fund, and Unlock Venture Partners. The company plans to prove a new way to cool computers in space, then buy a satellite bus from Apex Space and show it working in orbit in late 2027 or early 2028.

Companies such as SpaceX, Google, or Starcloud are exploring aspects of the traditional satellite form of the proposed space data center constellation, which relies on large radiators to keep the chips in a hot state. But Sophia Space’s founders — CTO Leon Alkalai, CEO Rob DeMillo, and chief growth officer Brian Monnin — have a different approach.

The company’s technology comes from an unusual source: a $100-million program at Caltech to develop rotating solar plants that can beam electricity to the Earth below. The researchers eventually settled on a sail-like structure that is thin and flexible compared to boxy, traditional satellites.

Although technical and regulatory challenges make generating electricity on Earth difficult, Alkalai, a colleague at Caltech’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, was intrigued by the idea of ​​using the design to power space-based processors. (Aetherflux, a solar energy startup in space, had a similar realization.)

Sophia, a partner of Nvidia, has designed modular servers with integrated solar panels that they call TILES, which are one meter by one meter in area and several centimeters deep. By adopting this thin form factor, Demillo says processors can sit against a passive heat spreader, eliminating the need for active cooling. He expects that 92% of the energy it produces will be processed, which is a huge advantage over traditional designs. This design requires, however, a complex software management system to balance work across processors.

In the 2030s, Sophia hopes to build large space data centers on thousands of TILEs, envisioning a 50 meter by 50 meter building delivering 1 MW of computing power. Demillo argues that trying to build space data centers with inefficient systems would not be economical, and that a single building rather than a distributed network connected by lasers would be easier to use.

First, however, Sophia plans to start by offering its TILEs to satellite operators who need computing solutions in orbit. Potential partners include earth observation satellites that collect vast amounts of sensor data, missile warning and tracking systems that the Pentagon is investing billions of dollars to build, or even increasingly sophisticated communications networks.

“The dirty little secret of the satellite industry is that we have all these amazing sensors up there that generate terabytes, or petabytes, of data every few minutes, and they dump most of it because they can’t do the computing on board and they can’t go back and forth up there fast enough,” Demillo told TechCrunch.