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

Source: TechCrunch

As space companies itch to push the most advanced chips into orbit, the problem of cooling those high‑powered processors is top of mind.

“It’s cold in space…[but] there’s no airflow, and so the only way to dissipate is through conduction,” – Jensen Huang, CEO of NVIDIA, on space‑based data centers during the company’s most recent earnings call.

Funding round

Sophia Space has raised $10 million from investors including Alpha Funds, KDDI Green Partners Fund, and Unlock Venture Partners. The company plans to demonstrate a new approach to passively cooling space computers on the ground, then purchase a satellite bus from Apex Space and show that it works in orbit by late 2027 or early 2028.

Technology and design

The company’s tech originates from a $100‑million‑endowed program at Caltech that aimed to develop orbital solar plants capable of beaming electricity to Earth. Researchers settled on a sail‑like structure that is thin and flexible compared with traditional boxy satellites.

While producing electricity for Earth presents technical and regulatory challenges, Leon Alkalai, a fellow at the Caltech‑managed Jet Propulsion Laboratory, saw the potential to use the design for powering space‑based processors. (Aetherflux, a space solar‑power startup, has had a similar realization.)

Sophia, an NVIDIA partner, has designed modular server racks with integrated solar panels called TILES. Each TILE is 1 m × 1 m in area and only a few centimeters deep. By adopting this thin form factor, processors can sit against a passive heat spreader, eliminating the need for active cooling. The company expects 92 % of the generated power to go to processing—a significant gain over traditional designs. This approach requires a sophisticated software management system to balance activity across the processors.

Future roadmap

By the 2030s, Sophia aims to build larger space data centers composed of thousands of TILES, envisioning a 50 m × 50 m structure delivering 1 MW of computing power. The company argues that a single, monolithic structure will be more economical and easier to execute than a distributed network linked by lasers.

Initially, Sophia plans to offer its TILES to satellite operators that need on‑orbit compute solutions. Potential partners include:

• Earth‑observation satellites that generate large volumes of sensor data
• Missile‑warning and tracking systems funded by the Pentagon
• Complex communications networks

“The dirty little secret of the satellite industry is we’ve got all these amazing sensors up there that produce terabytes, or even petabytes, of data every few minutes, and they throw most of it out because they can’t do the computing on board and they can’t get round‑trip back and forth to the surface fast enough,” – Rob Demillo, CEO of Sophia Space.