Satlyt, founded by a former Google and SpaceX product manager, raises $8M to run AI on satellites

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REGISTER NOW Disrupt doors open Oct. 13. Get your pass and bring someone with you at 50% off. REGISTER NOW. The way Rama Afullo tells it, he saw orbital data centers coming. The Kenyan American engineer previously worked in Google’s cloud computing business before a brief stint at SpaceX’s Starlink communications network in 2024. His experiences convinced him that there was untapped potential for computers in space. “When I was at SpaceX, I tried to pitch this internally. They said no. When I was at Google, I tried to pitch this internally. They said no,” he tells TechCrunch. So he left SpaceX and co-founded Satlyt, a new company with headquarters in Sunnyvale, California, and Nairobi, to build software for satellites that he hopes will let many satellites share the work of large computing jobs in space. The company has raised an $8 million seed round, Afullo exclusively told TechCrunch. The timing looks good for him. SpaceX has since gone all-in on orbital data centers, and Satlyt’s software is set to launch Thursday on a SpaceX rocket alongside the first prototype for Google’s space data center effort, Project Suncatcher.