The company's MOI-1A spacecraft, a sub-50 kg satellite carrying Nvidia Orin NX edge-computing processors, is scheduled to fly on SpaceX's Transporter-18 rideshare mission.
TakeMe2Space says it has already signed 23 customers for the mission, including geographic information system companies and educational institutions, with commercial users spanning agriculture, mining, supply-chain management and insurance.
US-based space data analytics firm Little Place Labs is among its customers.
Computing where the data lives
Customers will be able to upload containerized AI models to the satellite, which can process data as it passes over a specified area and transmit the analysis to Earth rather than the full underlying dataset.
"The customer who sees value in our first-generation satellites is the one paying to download a lot of raw data and then do the compute," founder and CEO Ronak Samantray told Reuters.
"The reduction in the cost of not downloading it offsets the premium they pay for compute in orbit."
The satellite delivers roughly 117 trillion operations per second of edge AI compute from its Nvidia Orin NX processors, alongside a 9-band multispectral imager for Earth observation and two terabytes of onboard storage — all on a power budget of about 150 watts, a fraction of a terrestrial server rack.
A second shot after a lost satellite
The road to orbit was not smooth. TakeMe2Space flew a technology-demonstration mission in late 2024 that validated its ability to upload applications, perform AI inference in orbit and download results. A subsequent satellite, MOI-1, was lost after a launch-vehicle third-stage failure, according to Reuters.
The company, operating on roughly $5 million to $5.6 million in seed funding, chose to rebuild and book a ride on a SpaceX Falcon 9 instead of waiting.
Samantray framed MOI-1A not as a data center in space but as a compact edge-computing node — in contrast to companies like SpaceX and Starcloud that plan to fly more advanced Nvidia chips of the kind used in terrestrial data centers.
Betting on orbit-first AI workloads
TakeMe2Space's longer-term plan is to build larger, networked satellites capable of serving multiple customers.
If MOI-1A succeeds on October 1, the startup will have demonstrated one of the first commercially flown orbital AI-compute platforms in the Asia-Pacific region, tapping into a growing race to move computing closer to the data it processes.
By Hamza Faisal
