Bellevue, Wash.-based Lumen Orbit, a startup that’s only about three months old, says that it’s closed a $2.4 million pre-seed investment round to launch its plan to put hundreds of satellites in orbit, with the goal of processing data in space before it’s downloaded to customers on Earth.
The investors include Nebular, Caffeinated Capital, Plug & Play, Everywhere Ventures, Tiny.vc, Sterling Road, Pareto Holdings and Foreword Ventures. There are also more than 20 angel investors, including four Sequoia Scouts investing through the Sequoia Scout Fund. “The round was 3x oversubscribed,” Lumen CEO and co-founder Philip Johnston told GeekWire in an email.
Johnston is a former associate at McKinsey & Co. who also co-founded an e-commerce venture called Opontia. Lumen’s other co-founders are chief technology officer Ezra Feilden, whose resume includes engineering experience at Oxford Space Systems and Airbus Defense and Space; and chief engineer Adi Oltean, who worked as a principal software engineer at SpaceX’s Starlink facility in Redmond, Wash.
“We started Lumen with the mission of launching a constellation of orbital data centers for in-space edge processing,” Oltean explained in an email. “Essentially, other satellites will send our constellation the raw data they collect. Using our on-board GPUs, we will run AI models of their choosing to extract insights, which we will then downlink for them. This will save bandwidth downlinking large amounts of raw data and associated cost and latency.”
Lumen’s business plan calls for deploying about 300 satellites in very low Earth orbit, at an altitude of about 315 kilometers (195 miles). The first satellite would be a 60-kilogram (132-pound) demonstrator that’s due for launch in May 2025 as a rideshare payload on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket.
Johnston said Lumen is partnering with Ansys and Solidworks on satellite design and development, and is in the process of filing applications with the Federal Communications Commission and the International Telecommunication Union.
What about customers? “We have several MOUs [memorandums of understanding] for more than $30 million, and we have a paying customer flying with us on our first demonstrator,” Johnston said. He said the $2.4 million investment round “gets us a launched, revenue-generating prototype in 16 months.”
“At the end of 2025 we will launch a full-scale prototype,” Johnston said. “Six months after that, we will launch the first orbital plane of eight [satellites], and six to 12 months after that, we will launch the first five orbital rings.”
Lumen Space’s founders aren’t the only ones aiming to put data centers in orbit: ASCEND, a project funded by the European Union, has been looking into the feasibility of creating a fleet of space-based data centers, with Thales Alenia Space taking a leading role. And Texas-based Axiom Space says it’s partnering with Kepler Space and Skyloom to set up an orbital data center on Axiom’s first space module, which is due for launch in the 2026-2027 time frame.
Rob Meyerson, a longtime aerospace executive who’s the former president of Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin space venture and a current member of Axiom Space’s board of directors, told GeekWire back in 2021 that in-orbit data storage and processing was one of the space industry’s most attractive new markets.
Today, Johnston said he doesn’t regard Axiom’s planned data center as competition for what Lumen has in mind. “We don’t view anyone else as being able to offer the service that we will be able to offer with what is currently publicly available,” he said.