Sophia Space Raises $10M for Orbital Computing

Key Takeaways

1. Sophia Space, a Pasadena-based startup co-founded by former NASA JPL Fellow Dr. Leon Alkalai and CEO Rob DeMillo, closed a $10 million seed round led by Alpha Funds, KDDI Green Partners Fund, and Unlock Venture Partners.
2. The company is developing modular, solar-powered, passively cooled compute modules called TILEs (Thermal-Integrated LEO Edge), each measuring 1m x 1m, designed for AI processing directly in orbit.
3. This seed round builds on a $3.5 million pre-seed raised in May 2025, bringing total known funding to approximately $13.5 million.
4. Sophia Space plans to validate its passive cooling technology on the ground, then acquire a satellite bus from Apex Space and demonstrate it in orbit by late 2027 or early 2028.

Quick Recap

Sophia Space, a space computing startup incubated at Mandala Space Ventures, announced the closing of a $10 million seed financing round on February 24, 2026. The round was led by Alpha Funds (founded by Astronaut J.D. Russell), KDDI Green Partners Fund, and Unlock Venture Partners. CEO Rob DeMillo described the milestone as “a validation that we are progressing from slideware to hardware” and “evidence that capital is shifting towards orbital-compute infrastructure”. The news was reported by TechCrunch on February 26, 2026.

TILE Architecture Enables Airless Chip Cooling

The core technical challenge of space-based computing is thermal management. As Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang noted during a recent earnings call: “It’s cold in space … but there’s no airflow, and so the only way to dissipate is through conduction”. Most proposed orbital data center designs, from companies like SpaceX and Starcloud, rely on large radiators attached to traditional satellite form factors to manage heat.​

Sophia Space is taking a fundamentally different approach. Its technology traces back to a $100 million Caltech program originally designed to develop orbital solar plants capable of beaming electricity to Earth. Researchers settled on a thin, sail-like structure, and co-founder Dr. Leon Alkalai recognized this design could power space-based processors instead.

The result is the TILE platform: modular server racks with integrated solar panels, each just a few centimeters thick. In this form factor, processors sit against a passive heat spreader, eliminating active cooling entirely. DeMillo claims 92% of generated power goes directly to processing, a major efficiency gain over conventional satellite designs. The modules are radiation-resistant and vendor-agnostic, with configurations supporting either Qualcomm Snapdragon or Nvidia Jetson and Blackwell chipsets. 

Looking further ahead, Sophia envisions assembling thousands of TILEs into a 50-meter by 50-meter structure delivering 1 megawatt of computing power by the 2030s. Early revenue will come from selling TILEs to satellite operators handling Earth observation, missile tracking, and complex communications.​

The Orbital Compute Gold Rush

Sophia Space is entering a market that has gone from speculative to competitive in under 18 months. At least eight companies are now actively pursuing orbital data center infrastructure, with three already operating hardware in orbit as of early 2026. The catalysts are clear: terrestrial AI data centers are straining power grids, consuming vast water resources for cooling, and facing community opposition. Meanwhile, satellite constellations are generating more data than downlink bandwidth can handle.

Major players are making significant moves. SpaceX and xAI, now a combined $1.25 trillion entity, filed for one million data center satellites. Google’s Project Suncatcher is exploring orbital compute with custom TPUs. Nvidia-backed Starcloud successfully ran an H100 GPU in orbit in November 2025, proving that data-center-class AI hardware can function in space. China has launched the first 12 satellites of a planned 2,800-strong orbital supercomputer network.

Sophia differentiates itself from these competitors through its asset-light business model. “We don’t pay for launch costs,” DeMillo explained. “It is the client who pays for the launch cost to get everything in orbit. That gives us the ability to collect revenue with very little spent on getting everything to orbit”.​

Competitive Landscape

The orbital computing market features startups at various stages, from pre-launch to operational hardware in orbit. Below is a comparison of Sophia Space against two similarly sized and directly relevant competitors in the emerging orbital edge computing segment.

Starcloud leads in execution, having already operated a data-center-class GPU in orbit and secured strategic backing from IN-Q-Tel and Nvidia. However, Sophia Space’s passive cooling architecture and asset-light model could prove more cost-effective at scale, particularly for operators who need modular, bolt-on compute rather than standalone satellite infrastructure.

Techno Trenz’s Takeaway

I think this is a big deal, and here is why. Sophia Space is not just another startup chasing the orbital data center hype. In my experience covering space and tech funding, the companies that win are not always the ones with the flashiest demos but the ones with the most elegant engineering tradeoffs. Sophia’s passive cooling approach, borrowed from Caltech’s solar sail research, is exactly the kind of non-obvious insight that can redefine a market.