The financing will support product development, engineering and customer delivery teams, and deployments aboard spacecraft operated by other companies.

The round was led by non sibi ventures, with participation from TLCOM, Antler, Slauson & Co., Launch Africa Ventures, Enza Capital, Askya Investment Partners, Demos, BAG Collective, Gaingels and AXIAN Investment.

Existing investors also contributed additional capital, according to the company’s October 1 announcement.

Founded in 2024 by Rama Afullo, who previously worked at Google and SpaceX, Satlyt operates from Nairobi and Sunnyvale, California.

Its approach centers on installing software on partner spacecraft before launch or uploading it once they are in orbit, allowing the company to expand without building its own satellite fleet.

Satlyt addresses a practical constraint in satellite operations: spacecraft collect information that cannot always be transmitted immediately because communications capacity and contact windows are limited.

Processing data onboard allows operators to receive selected results and diagnostic summaries instead of downloading every raw image, system log or measurement for analysis on Earth.

“Running applications on existing spacecraft gives operators a way to do more with the computing hardware they already have in orbit,” said Afullo, Satlyt’s founder and CEO.

Google DeepMind has documented Satlyt’s deployment of its Gemma 3 1B model aboard a satellite to analyze operational data and diagnose software faults.

In two tests involving deliberately introduced errors, the model reduced the diagnostic data prepared for transmission by 64.4% and 64.8%.

These results concern specific diagnostic workloads rather than reductions across all satellite communications.

The technology must operate within spacecraft limits on electricity, memory and heat management.

Satlyt is testing smaller and more specialized AI workloads to make onboard processing practical while preserving computing capacity for other satellite functions.

For Kenya, the investment supports a company with a substantial engineering presence in Nairobi and backing from African investors.

Satlyt also reports signed memoranda of understanding with the Kenya Space Agency and Angola’s GGPEN, connecting its international technology development to African space institutions.

Satlyt’s longer-term objective is to coordinate computing resources across satellites owned by different operators.

Its current capabilities focus on processing within individual spacecraft, making reliable deployment across more missions the next step toward its proposed network of virtual AI data centers in space.