Orbital compute startup Sophia Space has raised $10 million.

The round was led by Alpha Funds, KDDI Green Partners Fund, and Unlock Venture Partners.

The company's TILE platform features solid-state, self-sustaining compute modules that offer radiation-resistant, vendor-agnostic performance, which it pitches adding to other businesses' satellites.

“Sophia Space is pioneering scalable supercomputing in orbit; fueling the emerging space economy, strengthening national defense infrastructure, and helping to save lives on Earth by processing massive volumes of space-generated Earth observation data in real time,” Dr. Leon Alkalai, founder and CTO of Sophia Space, said.

​​“It effectively reduces bandwidth demands and latency, enabling faster, real-time decision-making for time-critical missions, from defense and disaster response to maritime awareness and monitoring vital energy infrastructure.”

Rob DeMillo, co-founder and CEO, added: “Our TILE modules, enhanced with patented cooling technology, let us scale AI in ways that are simply unmatched. With this Seed round, we’re not just building compute modules, we’re building the infrastructure for the next era of space-based AI and data processing.”

With a focus on Edge and AI inference, the company is targeting smaller workloads than SpaceX, which has pitched sending a million data centers into space. The proposal has been met by skepticism from AWS, OpenAI, and others.

Companies including Axiom Space, Starcloud (previously Lumen Orbit), NTT, Lonestar, Ramon.Space, and Jeff Bezos's Blue Origin are also looking at deploying in-orbit compute.