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Today’s feature of Quick Pitch is a special one. It’s an early-stage startup built by a UK founder that is looking to build data centres in space, AND it’s the first early-stage business that Quick Pitch has secured an allocation to invest it. If you’re interested complete the poll at the bottom!
The Market
AI is driving a huge increase in demand for both data centres and energy which McKinsey predicts will create a “significant supply deficit” by 2030.
This week's business solves two major problems:
Cost of energy: Running data centres on earth requires a huge amount of electricity. Lumen Orbit will power its data centre using solar power, and will also need less energy as data centres will be naturally cooled by the low temperature in space.
Space: Companies are growing out of their data centres alarmingly quickly and are struggling to expand them due to a lack of space. Lumen Orbit will have a modular approach where companies can easily scale their centres.
One Liner
Lumen Orbit is building a network of megawatt-scale data centres in space, scaleable to gigawatt capacity, to be able to train large models like GPT6. Falling launch costs give it access to:
Abundant energy
Passive cooling
The ability to rapidly scale in space
Quickfire
Employee count: 4
Investors: NFX, Fuse.VC, Soma Capital, and scout funds from Andreessen Horowitz and Sequoia
Funding amount: $11m
Business model: B2B
Traction metrics:
In Partnership with NVIDIA's Inception Program, it is launching their demonstrator satellite in May 2025, which will have 100x more powerful GPUs than have ever been operated in space.
Designed and started building and testing their first spacecraft
Secured high-value LOIs for H100 compute time in space
Raised a massively over-subscribed seed round for top tier VCs
Due Diligence
APPEALS
| POTENTIAL RISKS
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Competition
There’s plenty of competition in the data centre space but no other company has announced plans to build centres in space. These are the biggest data centre companies:
Amazon Web Services: The largest cloud service provider and data centre company worldwide.
Microsoft Azure: The second-largest cloud service provider globally with more than 200 data centre facilities
Google Cloud Platform (GCP): The third-largest cloud provider, with 39 cloud regions and 118 availability zones.
Meta: Owns and operates 24 data centres globally, comprising over 53 million square feet.
Founders
Philip, CEO, is a second-time UK founder who has worked at McKinsey & Co. working on satellite projects for national space agencies. Philip has an MPA in National Security & Technology from Harvard University, an MBA from Wharton, an MA in Applied Mathematics & Theoretical Physics from Columbia University, and is a CFA Charter holder.
Ezra, CTO, has a decade of experience with satellite design, specialising in deployable solar arrays and large deployable structures. Ezra comes from Airbus Defense & Space (SSTL) and Oxford Space Systems, where he worked on missions including NASA's Lunar Pathfinder. Ezra has a PhD in Materials Engineering from Imperial College London.
Adi, Chief Engineer, was previously a Principal Software Engineer at SpaceX. Before that, he deployed the first LLMs on large GPU production clusters at Microsoft. Adi holds degrees in Computer Science and Chemistry from the top two universities in Bucharest.
We have secured an opportunity to invest in Lumen Orbit, provided there is enough demand. If you’re keen complete the poll below and we will be in touch!
Are you interested in investing in this startup? |
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If you’re a startup founder and want your startup to be featured in a Quick Pitch in front of hundreds of VCs and angels - fill out this form and we’ll get back to you!