Satellite AI software startup Satlyt raises $8 million seed round
Satlyt Inc., founded in 2024 by former SpaceX Starlink product manager Rama Afullo, has raised $8 million led by Non Sibi Ventures for AI software that processes satellite data in orbit.
The company was founded in 2024 by chief executive officer Rama Afullo, who previously worked as a product manager at SpaceX Corp.'s Starlink business and earlier as a cloud architect at Google LLC. Google launched its first AI-powered satellite into orbit last week.
Satlyt's software targets a constraint in orbital computing. Most satellites carry a relatively limited amount of onboard computing equipment, so they generally do not process the data they collect locally but instead beam it to ground-based servers. The average satellite is within range of its operator's terrestrial antenna for only a few minutes each day, which caps the volume of data that can be sent to Earth, and the data loses accuracy on its way to the antenna.
Satlyt's namesake AI platform is designed to enable satellites that include graphics processing units to process some of the data they collect internally. That reduces the amount of information they must send to Earth and eases the associated networking challenges.
The first satellite to feature Satlyt's platform was launched into low-Earth orbit in March. The system was built by a venture-backed startup called Momentus Inc. and uses Satlyt's software to run Google's open-source Gemma 3 1B language model. To evaluate the system, the companies simulated a set of common satellite software errors; Satlyt's platform used Gemini to collect error logs, identify the root cause and suggest a fix, reducing the telemetry that had to be beamed down for analysis by more than 64%.
As of April, Satlyt was working to upgrade its stack to a newer and more capable AI model called Gemma 4 E2B. The company is also exploring ways of reducing AI models' hardware footprint and has set a goal of lowering Gemma 4 E2B's memory usage by more than 90%.
Another satellite carrying Satlyt's software was scheduled to take off later in the day of the report aboard a SpaceX rocket. NASA will use the company's software to test new orbital computing methods, and Stellerian Inc., a space observation startup, plans to run image processing algorithms aboard the system.
Satlyt is reportedly working on a new software tool that will make it possible to distribute workloads across multiple satellites. The first system to feature that technology is set to launch into orbit next year.