Satellites Startups funded by Y Combinator (YC) 2026

Building the elements of a new ATC system.

Zephyr Fusion is building the first in-orbit fusion power source: a megawatt-class reactor enabling large-scale industry in space, at a fraction of the cost of equivalent solar. Founded by former physicists from Lawrence Livermore and Oak Ridge National Laboratories, Zephyr leverages decades of fusion research to deliver a compact magnetic confinement system designed to take advantage of the space environment.

Starcloud is building data centers in space, initially to provide GPU compute to other satellites, and later to address the rapidly growing demand for energy caused by the deployment of AI. Falling launch costs give Starcloud access to abundant energy, radiative cooling, and the ability to rapidly scale in space. In November 2025, just 21 months after founding, Starcloud launched its first satellite, Starcloud-1 to space. This has an Nvidia H100, which is 100x more powerful GPU than has ever been operated in space before. With this, they became the first entity to train an LLM in space and the first to run a version of Gemini in space. Starcloud will soon also run high-powered inference on Capella SAR data on orbit for the first time. Starcloud is launching its second satellite in October 2026, which will have 100x the power generation of the first and generate more cash than it costs to build and launch. Starcloud expects that within 10 years, most new data centers will be being built in space for the energy. In March 2026, Starcloud raised a $170M Series A led by Benchmark, becoming the fastest unicorn in YC history, just 17 months after demo day.

Elodin creates flight software, simulations, and hardware for drones, satellites, and defense.

Care Weather collects the highest-accuracy global weather data to help governments and shipping companies adapt to extreme weather. The data is collected by Care Weather’s unique flat-panel radar satellite, which is 1000X more cost effective because it’s vertically integrated, gets more solar power, and sails on top of the atmosphere for a closer view of the surface. Our team includes CEO Patrick Walton (NASA Earth science fellow) and CTO Alex Laraway (mach 4 rockets). In the last 4 months, we built and launched the smallest radar satellite ever. We have $35M worth of LOIs, including one from the Air Force and others from cargo shippers. Care Weather is backed by Boost VC, Kickstart Seed Fund, Y Combinator, and more.

Orbio uses satellite imagery to track methane emissions from the oil & gas industry. We sell the data to financial companies that want to invest into the best performing energy companies. Until today, oil & gas companies use excel-based emission factors to calculate and report their emissions. As these excel-based emission factors underestimate actual emissions by ~70%, the finance companies that invest into oil & gas can’t mitigate against incoming risks from new regulations, We have built a technology that can for the first time use satellite images to track methane from every single oil & gas facility on the planet, replacing emission factors and allowing finance companies to make the best bets on oil & gas companies that will withstand a wide avalanche of incoming regulation. In the summer 2023 our satellite-based technology got ranked #1 both in terms of accuracy and sensitivity of methane emission events by Stanford University in a peer-reviewed study, beating a range of multi-bn dollar competitors like Maxar. Learn more at https://orbio.earth

Hubble is building a global satellite network that any Bluetooth-enabled device can connect to, even without cellular reception. Our mission in life is to get a billion devices connected to the network and unlock a new era of human-machine collaboration.

Radical’s StratoSats are autonomous platforms that provide satellite-like services on demand. They fly within Earth’s atmosphere to provide persistent, high performance infrastructure across applications in earth observation, connectivity, and more. Unlike satellites, StratoSats navigate freely without the need for rocket launches or orbits - reducing costs, increasing flexibility, and ensuring customers get the targeted coverage they need.

We're designing swarms of tiny satellites which will work together to create the first real-time, high-resolution 3D model of the earth. By using clusters of satellites to image the same place on the earth at the exact same time, we can improve image quality by more than 60x over conventional techniques. This technology will massively increase the amount of affordable, high-quality 3D data, enabling a host of new applications across an array of industries, including AR/XR/Autonomy, Defense, Climate/ESG, and Insurance Analytics.

Quindar is a web app used by satellite owners to analyze, test and operate their constellation. For example, Airbus could use Quindar to operate their satellite fleet with minimal human intervention. We’re six former OneWeb engineers who helped build the software platform that currently operates the second largest satellite constellation in the world. The space industry is shifting from companies launching a handful of satellites over a decade, to launching hundreds of satellites EACH in just a few years. Our SaaS platform automates mission management and for a single engineer to operate hundreds of satellites instead of the traditional model of many engineers operating a single satellite.

AstroForge is an asteroid mining company. Instead of bringing back the entire asteroid, we break it up, refine, and return only what’s valuable.

Wyvern is a space data company that will capture the highest resolution hyperspectral images from satellites that cost 100X less than satellites using traditional telescopes.

Nova: Radically improving access to and from orbit. We’re unlocking the space economy by harnessing the power of full and rapid reusability with Nova, our 100% reusable rocket. Nova offers affordable access to, through, and from space with a 20x reduced cost to orbit. Our reusable upper-stage vehicle delivers on-demand access to any orbit at any time. Its unmatched capabilities enable dynamic space operations, including capture, reposition, long-dwell operations, and return of assets, as well as space cargo and logistics missions.

Turion Space is building spacecraft to move things around in space and image space objects when they’re not, and focused on developing the dual-use technology required to ensure a sustainable future in space. They aim to build a strong foundation selling space domain awareness imagery data while advancing their technology towards an affordable solution for orbital debris removal and eventually asteroid mining. The founding team originates from SpaceX, and after going through the Y-combinator accelerator in summer 2021 went on to raise a $6.2M seed round and is launching their first DROID satellite in early 2023.

Alba Orbital is building the world's largest earth observation constellation, imaging everywhere on earth, every 15 minutes. We can see events within minutes such as wildfires in real time and have signed >$85m of LOIs, with both government and commercial customers paying pre-orders for imagery. To date we have launched 62 satellites into orbit (more than any all other yc companies combined), with more launching in 2026 onwards. We have launched a number of technology demonstration imaging satellites called Unicorns, which are the world's most advanced satellite under 1kg ever flown in orbit.

Albedo builds and operates satellites in Very Low Earth Orbit (VLEO) — a new orbital layer much closer to Earth than traditional satellites in LEO. Flying lower unlocks sharper imagery, faster communications, and real-time maneuverability with smaller, more efficient hardware. VLEO is naturally self-cleaning and resilient, offering a sustainable alternative to crowded low Earth orbit - providing diversification and redundancy for critical systems that we rely on in higher orbits. With the only flight proven VLEO system on the market, Albedo is creating a new orbital infrastructure designed for speed, precision, and resilience.

Tesseract is a provider of cost effective propulsion components and systems for in-space applications spanning commercial Earth-orbiting satellites, robotic exploration missions, and human spaceflight.

Astranis builds advanced satellites for high orbits, expanding humanity’s reach into the solar system. Today Astranis satellites provide dedicated, secure networks to highly-sophisticated customers across the globe— large enterprises, sovereign governments, and the US military. With five satellites on orbit and many more set to launch soon, the company is servicing a backlog of more than $1 billion of commercial contracts. Astranis is the preferred satellite communications partner for buyers with stringent requirements for uptime, data security, network visibility, and customization. Astranis has raised over $750 million from some of the world’s best investors, from Andreessen Horowitz to Blackrock, and Fidelity, and employs a team of 450 engineers and entrepreneurs. Astranis designs, builds, and operates its satellites out of its 153,000 sq. ft. headquarters in Northern California, USA.