Former Google and SpaceX engineer’s startup raises $8 million to run artificial intelligence on satellites

Rama Afullo, a Kenyan-American engineer who worked in Google’s cloud business and then as a product manager for SpaceX’s Starlink network in 2024, has left SpaceX to found his own space company, as TechCrunch reports. Earlier in his career, Afullo was among Tesla’s first employees in Africa.

Satlyt, his new company based in Sunnyvale, California, and in Nairobi, is building software that enables many satellites to share large computing workloads between them in space — that is, to run artificial intelligence models directly on satellites, without relying on ground-based data centres.

The company has raised an $8 million seed investment round, according to Afullo’s own exclusive confirmation to TechCrunch, at a time when the race for computing power in space is intensifying.

Satlyt’s software is expected to launch on Thursday aboard a SpaceX rocket, together with the first prototype of Google’s space data centre effort, “Project Suncatcher”. Meanwhile, SpaceX too has invested heavily in orbital data centres.

Unlike SpaceX, Google or startups such as Starcloud and Cowboy Space Company, Satlyt will not build its own spacecraft. The founder compares his approach to the “Android” of space versus SpaceX’s “iPhone”: the company builds only the software, an open ecosystem that works on different companies’ satellites. He also compares the approach to VMware and Snowflake, which allow users to run complex software without worrying about the underlying infrastructure.