200 VCs wanted to get into Lumen Orbit’s $11M seed round

Lumen Orbit, a startup looking to build data centers in space, was able to close its recent seed round in mere days amid intense investor interest.

The Redmond, Washington-based company closed on an $11 million seed round at a $40 million valuation, confirming prior TechCrunch reporting that the company had raised a competitive double-digit round as one of the buzziest startups out of Y Combinator’s Summer 2024 batch. The deal was led by NFX — NFX general partner Morgan Beller will join the company’s board — with participation from VCs, including Fuse.VC, Soma Capital, and scout funds from Andreessen Horowitz and Sequoia, among others.

Lumen Orbit co-founder and CEO Philip Johnston told TechCrunch that due to the high investor demand — more than 200 hundred VCs reached out to the startup — the company has since opened up another SAFE round on top of it, at a higher valuation, to let more investors in.

The company is building orbital data centers that are made up of pods, which can hold compute and can be brought up individually, attaching to large solar panels in space in clusters (concept image above). Lumen’s goal is to build multi-gigawatt compute clusters by the end of the decade. These data centers will use a high-bandwidth optical laser to send information back down to Earth.

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