Satellite software provider Satlyt closes $8M investment

Satlyt Inc., an artificial intelligence software provider for satellites, has secured $8 million in funding for its seed round. The investment was led by Non Sibi Ventures and the startup was established in 2024 by CEO Rama Afullo, who previously worked at SpaceX and Google. Satellites typically have limited onboard computing capabilities, leading to challenges in processing data collected in orbit.

Satlyt's AI platform aims to address these issues by enabling some data processing onboard, reducing the amount of information sent to Earth and easing networking challenges. The company's platform was successfully demonstrated in a system built by Momentus Inc., which used Google's open-source Gemma 3 1B language model. Satlyt is now working on upgrading its AI model to Gemma 4 E2B and reducing its hardware footprint, targeting a 90% reduction in memory usage.

Another Satlyt-powered satellite is set to launch later today with NASA's assistance in testing new orbital computing methods, while Stellerian Inc. plans to run image processing algorithms on the system. The company is also developing a new software tool to distribute workloads across multiple satellites, with the first system expected to launch next year.