Grace Ashiru
Satellite software company Satlyt has raised $8 million in seed funding as it works to expand artificial intelligence and data-processing capabilities aboard spacecraft.
The funding round was led by non sibi ventures and attracted participation from TLCOM, Antler, Slauson & Co., Launch Africa Ventures, Enza Capital, Askya Investment Partners, Demos, BAG Collective, Gaingels, Axian Investment and existing backers. Satlyt said the fresh capital will support product development, recruitment and wider deployment of its software on satellites operated by third parties.
Satlyt is developing technology that allows satellites to process information in orbit instead of sending all collected data back to Earth for analysis. Satellites routinely capture imagery, measurements and system information, but limited communications capacity can delay the transmission and processing of large volumes of data.
By moving more computing tasks directly onto spacecraft, Satlyt aims to reduce these communications constraints and help operators access useful information faster. The technology could also allow software developers to deploy applications directly on satellite computing systems.
The company already has software operating in orbit. An earlier deployment involved running a Google Gemma artificial intelligence model aboard a satellite to analyse system logs, software errors and stack traces without relying entirely on ground-based processing.
Satlyt’s next planned deployment includes two applications aboard a third-party spacecraft: research software connected to its NASA Glenn Small Business Technology Transfer work with the University of Houston and a commercial imagery-processing application.
While the company currently focuses mainly on computing within individual spacecraft, its longer-term objective is more ambitious. Satlyt wants to create a common software layer that could coordinate computing resources across satellites operated by different organisations.
The company has its US headquarters in Sunnyvale, California, and its African headquarters in Nairobi, Kenya. Its leadership is Kenyan-American, with a significant engineering presence in Nairobi.
