Rama Afullo saw the orbital data center coming — and nobody inside the industry would listen. The Kenyan American engineer worked on cloud infrastructure at Google, then moved to SpaceX in 2024 to work on the Starlink communications network, and at both companies he pitched the same idea: satellites could handle serious computing jobs, not just relay signals.
"When I was at SpaceX, I tried to pitch this internally. They said no. When I was at Google, I tried to pitch this internally. They said no," Afullo told TechCrunch.

So he left SpaceX and co-founded Satlyt, a startup headquartered in Sunnyvale, California, and Nairobi, Kenya, that is building software to let many  satellites share the work of large computing jobs in orbit. The company has now raised an $8 million seed round, Afullo told TechCrunch exclusively.

Pitched inside Google and SpaceX, rejected by both

Afullo's frustration with his former employers has become Satlyt's founding story. Google had the cloud expertise, SpaceX had the satellites, but neither would commit to running real computing workloads in space. Since his departure, both companies have moved exactly in that direction: SpaceX has gone all-in on orbital data centers, and Google is flying its first space data center prototype under the Project Suncatcher program.

The timing proved fortunate. Satlyt's software was due to fly Thursday on a SpaceX rocket alongside the first prototype for Google's Suncatcher effort — a shared ride that places the startup's code next to the search giant's own hardware experiment. It is a striking bookend to Afullo's rejected internal pitches.

Software, not spacecraft

Unlike SpaceX, Google, or startups like Starcloud and Cowboy Space Company, Satlyt has no plans to build its own spacecraft. Instead, Afullo's team is building software to operate AI models on satellites built by other companies, splitting large jobs across multiple spacecraft the way cloud platforms distribute workloads across servers on the ground.
Afullo compares the approach to VMware and Snowflake — platforms that let users run complex software without worrying about the underlying infrastructure. "The folks like SpaceX who are doing orbital data centers — if they are the iPhone, we'll build Android as a horizontally integrated, open ecosystem," he said. In other words, Satlyt wants to offer software that works across many companies' satellites.
The company has already flown its software on two demonstration missions. Its initial focus is finding operational efficiencies for spacecraft, which typically depend on flight controllers on the ground to solve any problems that arise.

Why orbit computing is heating up



Satlyt is entering one of the fastest-forming frontiers in computing. Orbital data centers promise abundant solar power and natural cooling, and they could eventually serve applications that need compute physically closer to the data collection point — including Earth observation and in-space manufacturing.
The $8 million seed round gives Satlyt runway to prove that software, not hardware, is the missing layer in the orbital computing stack. If Afullo's bet is right, the future of cloud infrastructure won't be a single company's constellation — it will be an open ecosystem where satellites from many operators share the AI workload.