This Week in Startups · Nov 12, 2026 · 34m · 27m saved
With Rama Afullo, Founder and CEO of Satlyt
Rama Afullo, founder and CEO of Satlyt, told Jason Calacanis on This Week in Startups that his company has already run Google DeepMind's Gemma model onboard a satellite in orbit. Only 11.7% of the data it collected was worth sending to the ground. Google and SpaceX both had the engineers and the money to build orbital compute first. Rama pitched it inside both companies, was turned down each time, and left to build it himself.
"The last people who proposed something like this are no longer at the company." — Rama Afullo
Rama was Tesla's third employee in Africa, a cloud architect at Google and a Starlink product manager at SpaceX before he left to found Satlyt just over two years ago.
The full interview is covered here so you can skip it. 34 minutes of audio, 7 minutes of reading.
Here are the 6 insights that matter.
Key Takeaways
Satlyt already runs Google's Gemma model onboard a live satellite, filtering out most of its data before downlink
Only 11.7% of the data a satellite collected turned out to be worth sending to the ground, at $10–20 per gigabyte
Rama was told no to orbital compute at both Google and SpaceX before leaving to build it himself
Orbital data centers get 24/7 solar power and can reposition over any point on Earth within 90 minutes
Satlyt is relaying 4K video from lunar orbit for NASA, a step toward extending the same relay network to Mars
Launch costs need to fall from today's $15,000 per kilogram to about $100 for orbit to match the ground on price
Space is a cold vacuum, but satellites still overheat, because there's no air to carry the heat away
1. Told No Twice, Then Solo
Rama's path to Satlyt ran through two of the biggest names in space and cloud computing, and each one turned the idea down before he built it on his own.
Rama left SpaceX after three months because the company dismissed the idea he'd already pitched at Google
"I left Google and joined SpaceX and I thought, well, surely they'll take this seriously... I was told under no uncertain terms at the time that the last people who proposed something like this are no longer at the company." — Rama Afullo
Rama, a Kenyan American whose father worked on satellite and microwave communications and whose mother is a computer scientist, bought the "satlyt.ai" domain years before he had a company to put behind it. He left SpaceX just over two years ago to found Satlyt.
