Sophia Space raises $10M seed to showcase new computers

As the space industry is itching to push the most advanced chips into orbit, the problem of cooling the most powerful processors is of utmost importance.

“It’s cold in the air … (but) there’s no air, so the only way to destroy it is to drive it,” Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said when asked about data centers during his company’s recent earnings call.

Now, Sophia Space has raised $10 million from investors, including Alpha Funds, KDDI Green Partners Fund, and Unlock Venture Partners. The company plans to prove a new way to cool computers on the ground, then buy a satellite bus from Apex Space and show that it works in orbit in late 2027 or early 2028.

Companies such as SpaceX, Google, or Starcloud are evaluating how satellites are made for constellations that they want to be able to replicate in space, which rely on large radiators to keep the chips warm. But the founders of Sophia Space – CTO Leon Alkalai, CEO Rob DeMillo, and director of growth Brian Monnin – have a different approach.

The company’s technology comes from an unusual source: a $100-million program awarded to Caltech to create orbital solar plants that can illuminate the world below. The researchers settled on a spaceship-like system that is thinner and more flexible than boxy, traditional satellites.

Although technical and legal challenges make generating electricity on Earth difficult, Alkalai, a fellow at the Caltech-managed Jet Propulsion Laboratory, was intrigued by the idea of ​​using this design to power space-based processors. (Aetherflux, the source of solar energy, has common sense.)

Sophia, a partner of Nvidia, has developed modular rack servers with integrated solar panels called TILES, which are 1 meter by 1 meter in area and a few centimeters deep. By adopting this thin form factor, DeMillo says the processors can stand up against a heat sink, eliminating the need for rapid cooling. They expect that 92% of the energy it produces will be processed, a huge benefit for society. This design requires, however, an advanced software management system to be able to coordinate operations across processors.

By the 2030s, Sophia hopes to create a massive data center from thousands of TILEs, envisioning a 50-by-50-meter grid providing 1 MW of computing power. DeMillo argues that trying to build a storage facility with inefficient systems would be uneconomical and that a single system instead of a distributed network connected by lasers would be easier to implement.

First, however, Sophia plans to start by offering its TILEs to satellite users who need computer solutions. Potential partners include earth observation satellites that collect massive amounts of sensor data, missile warning and tracking systems that the Pentagon is investing billions of dollars in building, or even more sophisticated communications networks.

“The dirty little secret of the satellite industry is that we have all these amazing sensors that generate terabytes, or petabytes, of data every few minutes, and they lose a lot of it because they can’t do the computing on board and they can’t go back and forth to the surface enough,” DeMillo told TechCrunch.