Lumen Orbit has closed an oversubscribed, eight-figure seed spherical of greater than $10 million, making it one in all, if not the, hottest deal of the latest Y Combinator batch, a supply accustomed to the small print informed TechCrunch.
The Redmond, Washington-based startup is pursuing a moonshot thought to construct a community of knowledge facilities in house that may scale to a gigawatt capability and be used to coach massive AI fashions. Lumen Orbit declined to remark.
The firm went via YC’s 2024 summer season batch and garnered a major quantity of consideration from VCs, a number of VCs informed TC. This curiosity led to an especially aggressive deal course of for the startup’s seed spherical.
While Lumen has a lofty mission, the corporate appears to be making notable progress already. It was based earlier this 12 months and is planning to launch its demonstrator satellite tv for pc in 2025 in partnership with Nvidia’s Inception program.
It’s not shocking that an organization trying to construct knowledge facilities in house would garner loads of curiosity. There’s such an enormous scramble to energy AI that corporations like Microsoft, Google and Amazon are inking offers with nuclear energy vegetation. Data facilities are anticipated to devour 9% of total power consumption within the U.S. by 2030.
Lumen isn’t the one firm trying to remedy the potential knowledge middle disaster, neither is it the one one trying to take the problem to the good past. Lonestar Data Holdings is one other that has raised $5.eight million and plans to construct knowledge facilities on the moon.
Venture capitalists lately informed TechCrunch that whatever the knowledge middle resolution, buyer adoption is probably going going to be robust for these startups. Still, VCs like to guess on corporations with unique options to huge issues.
Lumen was based in January 2024 by Philip Johnston, CEO, Ezra Feilden, CTO, and Adi Oltean, chief engineer. The startup had beforehand raised a $2.four million pre-seed spherical in March that was led by Nebular with participation from Everywhere Ventures, Tiny VC and Sequoia amongst others.
