Sophia Space

Sophia Space is a Pasadena, California-based orbital-compute startup founded in 2025 by CEO Robert DeMillo and co-founder Brian Monnin, with a founding team drawn from NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Microsoft and commercial-computing backgrounds. The company is developing TILE (Thermal Integrated LEO Edge) modules, satellite-hosted compute nodes that use passive radiative cooling - shedding heat directly to space rather than relying on physical heat pumps - to run AI and data-processing workloads in low Earth orbit with more of their power budget going to computing rather than cooling.

In June 2026 Sophia Space announced a $7 million SAFE (Simple Agreement for Future Equity) financing round backed by EverGreen, an investor network of Nvidia alumni, and SparkLabs Group. Alongside the raise, the company said it had selected satellite manufacturer Apex Space's Nova satellite bus to host its first orbital demonstration of the TILE compute system, planned for 2027, with undisclosed customers expected to test the system on orbit. The company describes a roadmap toward operating full orbital data centers by around 2030.

As of its most recent public funding disclosure, Sophia Space had roughly 11 to 50 employees and had not yet flown hardware in orbit, putting it at an earlier, pre-flight stage relative to competitors such as Starcloud that have already launched demonstration compute payloads. Its emphasis on passive thermal management as a differentiator reflects the broader industry's focus on cooling, rather than power generation alone, as the binding constraint on in-space AI compute.