Euwyn Poon once figured out how to scatter 250,000 electric scooters across more than 100 cities. Now he wants to do roughly the same thing with data centers, except instead of sidewalks, he’s targeting low Earth orbit.
His startup Orbital just closed an oversubscribed $5M pre-seed round led by a16z’s Speedrun accelerator. The pitch: launch 10,000 satellite-based data centers capable of delivering up to a gigawatt of AI inference compute by 2028.
From scooters to satellites
Poon’s previous company, Spin, scaled to over 250,000 vehicles before Ford acquired it in 2018. The Los Angeles-based company plans to use the fresh capital to fund two things. First, Orbital-1, its inaugural test mission scheduled for 2027 aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket. Second, a new R&D facility in Los Angeles called Factory-1, where the company will develop and iterate on its satellite hardware.
The core thesis is straightforward. Terrestrial data centers face mounting constraints around power consumption and cooling. In space, you get continuous solar energy and the vacuum itself acts as an efficient thermal management system.
