Lonestar raises $5 million for lunar data centers

SAN FRANCISCO – Lonestar Data Holdings raised $5 million in seed funding for its plan to establish lunar data centers.

Scout Ventures led the round. Participants included Seldor Capital, 2 Future Holding, The Veteran Fund, Irongate Capital, Atypical Ventures and KittyHawk Ventures.

“We are thrilled to have completed this successful seed round and are sincerely grateful for the support and vision of our investors,” Lonestar CEO Chris Stott said in a statement.

Lunar Missions

St. Petersburg, Florida-based Lonestar is preparing to send a proof-of-concept data center to the moon later this year on Intuitive Machines’ second lunar mission, IM-2.

Intuitive Machines’ first lunar mission is scheduled to launch in June on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket. IM-2 is slated to follow later this year. NASA is providing funding through the Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) program for Intuitive Machines, Astrobotic, Draper and Firefly Aerospace to deliver payloads to the moon. CLPS is part of the space agency’s Artemis lunar exploration program.

Lonestar Markets

Lonestar’s initial data center, the size of a hardback novel, will be followed by a series of larger data centers offering data storage and edge processing.

An early market for Lonestar will be disaster recovery as a service for terrestrial customers, Stott said in December during a New York Space Business Roundtable discussion.

“The moon is a fantastic platform for this,” Stott said. “There is no climate, no climate change and access to renewable energy. You can build out amazing equipment up there.”

Brad Harrison, Scout Ventures founder and managing partner, said in a statement, “We believe that expanding the world’s economy to encompass the moon, which happens to be the Earth’s most stable satellite, is the next whitespace in the new space economy. Data security and storage will be a necessary part of leading the new generation of lunar exploration.”

While Lonestar is not focused on lunar exploration, the startup would not have been able to close its business case without the Artemis and CLPS programs, Stott said. “NASA has created an incredible marketplace for access to earth’s largest satellite,” he added.

Lonestar also intends to offer data storage and processing for commercial, government and academic lunar missions.