Sophia Space has secured $10 million in seed funding to validate a new architecture for high-performance computing in orbit.
The round included Alpha Funds, KDDI Green Partners Fund, and Unlock Venture Partners.
The startup is tackling one of the biggest constraints in space infrastructure: how to cool powerful processors without airflow.
Rethinking Space-Based Computing
While space is cold, it lacks air circulation. That means heat generated by advanced chips cannot dissipate through convection — only through conduction and radiation. As companies explore orbital data centers, thermal management has become a core engineering bottleneck.
Sophia Space is approaching the problem differently.
Instead of relying on bulky satellite designs with large external radiators, the company is building ultra-thin, modular computing units that integrate solar power and passive heat dissipation into a single structure.
The concept originates from a Caltech-backed orbital solar power research initiative, where thin, sail-like satellite structures were developed to beam energy back to Earth. Sophia Space’s team saw an opportunity to repurpose that architecture for space-based computing.
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Meet The “TILE”
At the core of Sophia’s design are modular server units called TILES — one meter by one meter panels just a few centimeters thick.
Each TILE integrates:
- Solar panels for onboard energy generation
- High-performance processors
- Passive heat spreaders to eliminate active cooling
By allowing processors to sit directly against passive thermal structures, the company claims up to 92% of generated power can be allocated to computing — a significant efficiency gain compared to traditional designs.
However, this thin architecture requires intelligent workload orchestration. Sophia is developing advanced software systems to dynamically balance processing loads and manage heat distribution across the network.
From Demo To Orbit
Sophia Space plans to validate its passive cooling system on the ground before purchasing a satellite bus from Apex Space. An in-orbit demonstration mission is targeted for late 2027 or early 2028.
The Bigger Vision: Orbital Data Centers
Long term, Sophia aims to build large-scale orbital compute arrays composed of thousands of TILES. A 50-by-50-meter structure could theoretically deliver up to one megawatt of computing power in space.
Rather than deploying distributed satellite constellations connected via laser links, the company believes unified structures will be more economically viable and operationally simpler.
Why It Matters
Today’s satellites collect terabytes — sometimes petabytes — of data within minutes. Much of it is discarded because onboard processing is limited and downlink bandwidth is constrained.
Sophia’s approach aims to shift compute directly into orbit, reducing data waste and enabling:
- Real-time Earth observation analysis
- Advanced defense systems
- Next-generation communications infrastructure
If successful, Sophia Space could help redefine how computing infrastructure scales beyond Earth.
