Satlyt lands $8M seed round for on-orbit AI software

Satlyt, a startup developing software to run AI models on satellites, has raised $8 million in a seed round led by Houston-based Non Sibi Ventures.

Co-founded by Rama Afullo, a Kenyan American engineer who previously worked in Google's cloud computing business and at SpaceX's Starlink network in 2024, the company is headquartered in Sunnyvale, California, and Nairobi. Satlyt does not plan to build its own spacecraft; instead, it offers a software layer similar to VMware and Snowflake, aiming to let multiple satellites share large computing workloads in orbit.

Satlyt's software has already flown on two demonstration missions. Earlier in 2026, it deployed Google DeepMind's Gemma model on a spacecraft operated by Momentus, cutting the size of a transmission about onboard software errors by more than 60 percent. The software is scheduled to launch on October 1, 2026, aboard a SpaceX rocket carrying a spacecraft built by India's TakeMe2Space, alongside the first prototype of Google's Project Suncatcher. The mission has three customers: NASA, paying to test protocols for space-based cloud computing; Stellerian, a space surveillance startup testing image processing workloads; and TakeMe2Space itself, demonstrating that the satellite can host other companies' software.

Satlyt's next project is a shared computing system spanning two satellites, which it expects to attempt in 2027.