Satellite software company Satlyt has raised $8 million in seed funding to expand artificial intelligence and data-processing capabilities directly aboard spacecraft, in a push to reduce the amount of information satellites need to send back to Earth for analysis.
The funding round was led by non sibi ventures, with participation from TLCOM, Antler, Slauson and Co., Launch Africa Ventures, Enza Capital, Askya Investment Partners, Demos, BAG Collective, Gaingels, Axian Investment and existing investors.
Satlyt said it will use the new capital to accelerate product development, expand its team and deploy its software more widely on satellites operated by third parties.
The company is developing software that enables satellites to process imagery, measurements, system logs and other data in orbit rather than transmitting all raw information to ground stations.
This addresses a growing constraint in the satellite industry, where spacecraft can collect large volumes of information but face limited communications capacity for transmitting that data to Earth.
By moving computing closer to where data is generated, Satlyt aims to reduce transmission requirements and allow satellite operators to obtain useful information faster.
The company has already demonstrated its technology in orbit. In an earlier deployment, Satlyt ran Google’s Gemma artificial intelligence model aboard a satellite to analyse system logs, software errors and stack traces without depending entirely on ground-based processing.
The deployment points to a broader shift in satellite infrastructure, where spacecraft are increasingly expected to do more than collect and transmit data.
Satlyt’s next planned deployment will place two applications aboard a third-party spacecraft. One is research software linked to its NASA Glenn Small Business Technology Transfer work with the University of Houston, while the other is a commercial application designed to process imagery.
The company is also seeking to make satellite computing more accessible to software developers by enabling applications to run directly on spacecraft computing systems.
Satlyt’s current focus is primarily on computing within individual satellites, but its longer-term ambition extends beyond individual spacecraft.
The company wants to develop a common software layer capable of coordinating computing resources across satellites operated by different organisations.
Such an infrastructure could allow computing workloads to be distributed across multiple spacecraft rather than being confined to the satellite where data was initially collected.
The strategy comes as satellite operators generate increasing volumes of data from Earth observation, communications, scientific research and other applications, creating pressure to improve how information is processed and transmitted.
For Satlyt, the opportunity is therefore not only to build software for individual satellites but also to establish an infrastructure layer for a more interconnected space-computing ecosystem.
The company is headquartered in Sunnyvale, California, with its African headquarters in Nairobi, Kenya. Its leadership is Kenyan-American and the company maintains a significant engineering presence in Nairobi.
The fresh funding gives Satlyt additional capital to expand that software infrastructure while increasing the number of spacecraft on which its technology operates.