2:17And are you running workloads like mini workloads on the first satellite? What does testing look like?
2:59Do you feel like the solution's in sight on some curve or maybe even already here? How is that going?
4:31Am I thinking about like hinges and little tiny motors to sort of like expand and unfurl?
5:32Are we going by orders of magnitude or is it like a lot of work and then they all start flying up really fast?
7:08Is there a world where we're like, oh, there's this one small use case that's going to really, really work well, and then maybe over time it'll do everything, but in the short term we're confident about this?
You're all good. It's great. We got back-to-back sound. Okay, so I can't turn this off. Second time on the show. Kick us off with the fundraising. Tell us what happened.
Oh, this works great. So yeah, talk to us about what you'll be building with that new round. Is this hiring? Are you going to be in the R&D phase? Do you have manufacturing partners lined up? Are you going to be buying heavy equipment to make stuff? What does the next couple years look like for you?
Yeah, so we're building the third satellite. That's very similar to, it's going to fit on the Starship Pez dispenser form factor. So it's this constellation. We've just filed with the SEC for 88,000 satellites. And so what this allows us to do is build a manufacturing line for that. 88,000 satellites, by the way, would allow us to deploy about 20 gigawatts of compute capacity, which is on the order of $100 billion worth of capex spend. So yeah, we're ramping up.
Absolutely wild. What kind of partners are you working with? I can imagine basically every chip company wants to have some exposure to what is an emerging, you know, will be an emerging category. How are you approaching that side?
Yeah, 100%. So we're working with Nvidia on, we just announced at GTC, Jensen announced it, this space Rubin chip. So it's like a slightly mass-optimized, slightly radiation-tolerant, and then slightly thermally-optimized chip which can be used for space inference. We've been working with them on that for a while because we've got an enormous amount of data now from the Starcloud 1 satellite, which has the first Nvidia H100 on board. And so we're using all of that telemetry to inform the design choices both on the Rubin chip and also on our second and third satellite.
Yeah, exactly. So we trained a model, so we trained it on the copy of nanoGPT on there. We did the first high-powered inference. So we're running a version of Gemini called Gemma on the spacecraft. And then we're now also doing some more like military kind of useful workloads, which is running inference on SAR data, so synthetic aperture radar, which is basically where satellites collect a 3D image of the world underneath them and then they can use that to detect things like a vessel entering, you know, entering your territory or other things.
How is the discussion going? How is the research and development going around heat dissipation? That felt like the key. Will it work? What are the economics? Are we expecting to be on track for some solution? Do you feel like the solution's in sight on some curve or maybe even already here? How is that going?
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Johnston, P. (2026, April 5). Starcloud CEO Philip Johnston on TBPN to talk about the $170M Series A at $1.1bn valuation. April 26 [Interview transcript]. Starcloud. CEOInterviews.AI. https://ceointerviews.ai/interview/3012040/
MLA
Philip Johnston. "Starcloud CEO Philip Johnston on TBPN to talk about the $170M Series A at $1.1bn valuation. April 26." Starcloud, 5 Apr. 2026. Transcript, CEOInterviews.AI, https://ceointerviews.ai/interview/3012040/.
BibTeX
@misc{johnston2026_3012040,
author = {Philip Johnston},
title = {Starcloud CEO Philip Johnston on TBPN to talk about the $170M Series A at $1.1bn valuation. April 26},
howpublished = {Interview transcript, Starcloud. CEOInterviews.AI},
year = {2026},
month = {apr},
url = {https://ceointerviews.ai/interview/3012040/},
note = {Speaker-attributed transcript with timestamps}
}
