Satlyt raises $8M to enable AI processing on satellites

Satlyt, a technology firm co-founded by Rama Afullo, who previously held product management roles at Google and SpaceX, has raised $8 million in seed funding. The capital will be used to develop and deploy artificial intelligence software intended for operation directly on satellites.

Afullo's vision for Satlyt stems from his experiences in Google's cloud computing division and SpaceX's Starlink project. He identified a significant opportunity to leverage onboard processing power in space, enabling complex AI tasks and data analysis to be performed in orbit rather than being transmitted back to Earth.

Unlike companies like SpaceX and Google, which are developing their own spacecraft and orbital data centers, Satlyt is focusing on software. The company aims to provide a platform that allows AI models to run on satellites from various manufacturers, drawing parallels to software virtualization and data warehousing companies like VMware and Snowflake.

The new funding is expected to accelerate Satlyt's software development and team expansion. The company's software is slated for its first deployment on an upcoming SpaceX rocket launch, coinciding with a prototype for Google's space data center initiative, signaling a growing trend in edge computing for space applications.