Sophia Space claims $10 million in seed round

SAN FRANCISCO – Sophia Space raised $10 million in seed funding to accelerate development of space-based edge computers and orbital data centers.

“The $10 million round is a validation that we are progressing from slideware to hardware,” Rob DeMillo, Sophia Space CEO and co-founder, told SpaceNews. “And it’s evidence that capital is shifting towards orbital-compute infrastructure.”

Alpha Funds, KDDI Green Partners Fund and Unlock Venture Partners led the $10 million investment round.

With the funds, Sophia Space will accelerate development of its orbital computing systems and proprietary thermal technology. The startup also is expanding its staff of engineers designing Tile, the technological building block of Sophia Space orbital data centers.

Once the designs are completed, Sophia Space will produce demonstration Tiles for environmental testing, DeMillo said.

Orbiting Data Centers

Sophia Space, founded in 2023 in Pasadena, California, plans to establish a constellation of orbital data centers with the first operating in the 2030s. For the next several years, Sophia Space will sell Tile directly to customers seeking space-based edge computing.  

Tile is a compute module, measuring one meter by one meter by one centimeter, that contains four enterprise servers. The servers are arranged in a patented array designed for solar-power generation and passive cooling.

“Sophia Space is delivering the kind of deep tech opportunity we look for, a space native platform solving the hard problems of thermal control, power efficiency, and reliability so AI inference and data processing can happen where the data is generated,” J.D. Russell, Alpha Funds founder and CEO, said in a statement.

Space-Based AI

Sophia Space, established in 2023 by retired NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory fellow Leon Alkalai, raised $3.5 million in pre-seed funding in 2025. That money helped the startup hire Jim Chase and other aerospace engineers from the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory as well as software engineers with cloud-computing expertise.

In a statement, Alkalai said Sophia Space’s scalable supercomputing in orbit will fuel “the emerging space economy, strengthening national defense infrastructure” and “save lives on Earth by processing massive volumes of space-generated Earth-observation data in real time.”

DeMillo said in a statement that the seed funding enables Sophia Space to build “the infrastructure for the next era of space-based AI and data processing.”