Satlyt Raises $8M to Run AI on Other Companies' Satellites — SkimNews
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- Satlyt raised an $8M seed round; co-founded by Rama Afullo, a Kenyan American engineer who worked in Google's cloud unit and briefly at SpaceX's Starlink in 2024, after both companies rejected his internal pitches for orbital data centers.
- Satlyt's software rides a SpaceX rocket Thursday alongside Google's first Project Suncatcher orbital data center prototype.
- Afullo is positioning Satlyt as software-only — unlike SpaceX, Google, Starcloud, and Cowboy Space Company — building no hardware and casting his company as a horizontal 'Android' platform for AI across any operator's satellites.
- Satlyt deployed Gemma, Google DeepMind's AI model, aboard a Momentus spacecraft earlier in 2025, cutting transmission size about onboard software errors by more than 60%.
- This week's flight runs on TakeMe2Space hardware for three customers: NASA (cloud-computing protocol test), Stellerian (space-surveillance image processing), and TakeMe2Space itself (multi-tenant hosting demo).
- Non Sibi Ventures led the seed round; former NASA astronaut Bernard Harris is a partner at the Houston-based firm.
- Satlyt aims to be live on 20% of all satellites by end of decade, starting with a two-satellite compute federation test planned for next year.
Why it matters: Satlyt's software-only 'Android' model collects revenue whether or not SpaceX and Google's orbital data center bets pay off — its Gemma demo already cut satellite transmissions by 60%+, saving operators hundreds of thousands of dollars per satellite per year. Non Sibi partner Kent Lucas framed it bluntly: Satlyt's economics ride the satellite launch cadence alone, with no orbital data center required to win.
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