Philip Johnston
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Philip Johnston (Starcloud): $250M Raise, NVIDIA & Data Centers in Space
Minutes after announcing a $250 million Series A extension at a $2.3 billion valuation, Starcloud's Philip Johnston details the raise — led by Manhattan West with participation from Benchmark, EQT, NVIDIA and Cisco. He recounts proving H100s work in orbit on Starcloud-1, the first commercial offering on Starcloud-2 in about six months, the space-optimized 'Space Rubin' chip for Starcloud-3, and an FCC filing for an 88,000-satellite constellation enabling roughly 20 gigawatts of orbital compute. He also covers the ~$500/kg launch-cost break-even, Texas banning new data centers, the Falcon 9 wind-down squeezing the launch market, why Starcloud won't build its own rocket, and an updated Dyson sphere timeline.
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Philip Johnston (Starcloud): Data Centers in Space, $1.1B Raise & Bitcoin Mining in Orbit
Johnston confirms Starcloud's recent $1.1 billion valuation raise, with much of the cash earmarked for a dedicated ~$75 million Falcon 9 launch, and argues space wins on energy because new terrestrial power projects face 5-10 year permitting lead times. He covers the NVIDIA 'Space Rubin' chip collaboration, radiation testing at the Knoxville cyclotron and Brookhaven lab, and a radiator design with 10x less mass and 100x less cost per watt than the ISS, plus bitcoin mining in orbit as a likely early use case. He shares the founding story—inspired by a Starbase trip, co-founding with Ezra, and a ~$500/kg break-even for moving compute to space—his proposal message written on the Starcloud-1 satellite, and the Matrioshka brain / Dyson sphere as the company's natural endpoint.