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Satlyt, a Sunnyvale- and Nairobi-based SpaceTech startup building software that enables satellite operators to process data and run AI onboard spacecraft, has raised $8 million in Seed funding.
The funding round was led by Houston-based non sibi ventures, with participation from TLCOM, Antler, Slauson & Co., Launch Africa Ventures, Enza Capital, Askya Investment Partners, Demos, BAG Collective, Gaingels, Asian Investment, and existing backers. The round also marks the first visible move by Askya Investment Partners, the Africa-focused firm founded last year by former Digital Africa chief executive Babacar Seck.
“We see a vast opportunity for software to make spacecraft computing more useful to operators and application developers. Satlyt is addressing that opportunity through deployments on third-party platforms. Its existing onboard work and planned support for commercial and research applications give the team a concrete foundation for pursuing a broader computing platform in space,” said Kent Lucas, co-founder and Managing Partner at non sibi ventures.
Founded in 2024, Satlyt is developing software that lets AI models run on satellites already in orbit, allowing multiple spacecraft to share large computing jobs. Rama Afullo, a Kenyan-American engineer, previously worked at Google and briefly at SpaceX’s Starlink unit. He partnered with Dr. Nelson Kigen Psenjen (CTO), a distributed-computing PhD who contributed to NASA’s Core Flight System, to build Satlyt.
Afullo likens the approach of Satlyt to VMWare and Snowflake, firms that let customers run software without managing the underlying infrastructure. TLCOM, one of the investors, explained that operators currently pay roughly $20 per gigabyte to send data from satellites to Earth, and about 80% of it is ultimately discarded, while more than 90% of onboard computing power sits idle.
Satlyt wants to make the computing hardware already aboard spacecraft more useful through software rather than building its own satellites. It installs its software via an over-the-air update with no hardware changes, turning each spacecraft into a node in a shared computing network. According to TLCOM, Satlyt’s software can cut downlink volumes “by up to 85%.”
“Running applications on existing spacecraft gives operators a way to do more with the computing hardware they already have in orbit,” said Afullo, founder and CEO of Satlyt.
“Our job is to make those applications practical to deploy and operate. This financing lets us expand the engineering and delivery teams needed to support more spacecraft and customers, while building toward computing resources that can work together across missions,” he added.
Satlyt has already flown its software on demonstration missions, and earlier this year, deployed Google DeepMind’s Gemma AI model aboard a spacecraft operated by Momentus, cutting the size of a transmission onboard software errors by more than 60%. Satlyt’s software is set to launch on a SpaceX rocket aboard a satellite built by Indian startup TakeMe2Space, in a mission involving NASA, space-surveillance startup Stellerian and TakeMe2Space.
The capital will fund product development, hiring, and wider deployment of the software on third-party satellites. Afullo says the goal of Satlyt is to put its software on 20% of satellites by the end of the decade and aims to link two separate satellites into one shared computing system next year.
