Sophia Space secures $10M seed funding to demonstrate next-generation space computers

As space companies look to deploy more advanced chips in orbit, one major issue keeps coming up: how to cool high-powered processors in space.

“It’s cold in space … [but] there’s no airflow, and so the only way to dissipate is through conduction,” Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said when asked about space-based data centres during his company’s most recent earnings call.

Now, Sophia Space has raised $10 million in seed funding from investors including Alpha Funds, KDDI Green Partners Fund, and Unlock Venture Partners. The startup says it plans to validate a new method for passively cooling space computers on the ground, then purchase a satellite bus from Apex Space and demonstrate the system in orbit by late 2027 or early 2028.

Several major players, including SpaceX, Google, and Starcloud, are exploring more traditional satellite designs for proposed space data centre constellations, typically relying on large radiators to keep processors within the right thermal range. Sophia Space’s founders — CTO Leon Alkalai, CEO Rob DeMillo, and chief growth officer Brian Monnin — say they are pursuing a different path.

Their approach traces back to an unexpected origin: a $100 million endowed program at Caltech aimed at developing orbital solar power plants that would beam electricity down to Earth. In that effort, researchers eventually moved toward a sail-like design that is thinner and more flexible than conventional box-shaped satellites.

Even though major technical and regulatory hurdles have made space-to-Earth power generation difficult, Alkalai — a fellow at the Caltech-managed Jet Propulsion Laboratory — saw potential for that structure in a different use case: powering space-based processors. Aetherflux, a space solar power startup, has reportedly made a similar connection.

Sophia, which is an Nvidia partner, has developed modular server racks with built-in solar panels that it calls TILES. Each TILE measures about 1 meter by 1 meter and is only a few centimetres thick. By using this slim form factor, DeMillo says processors can be mounted against a passive heat spreader, eliminating the need for active cooling. He expects that around 92% of the power generated can be directed toward processing, which would be a meaningful improvement compared to more traditional designs. However, the design depends on advanced software to manage workloads and balance computing activity across processors.

Looking longer term, Sophia says it wants to assemble much larger space data centres composed of thousands of TILEs, with a vision for a 50-meter-by-50-meter structure capable of delivering 1 megawatt of computing power. DeMillo argues that space data centres built with less efficient architectures won’t be economical, and that building a single large structure — rather than a distributed network connected via lasers — will be simpler to execute.

Before that future takes shape, Sophia says it will start by offering TILE-based computing to satellite operators that need more onboard processing. Potential use cases include Earth-observation satellites that generate massive volumes of sensor data, missile warning and tracking systems that the Pentagon is funding at scale, and increasingly 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,” DeMillo said.