German startup NeuralSat GmbH announced Thursday that it raised €2.9 million, about $3.2 million, in pre-seed funding to develop a 72-satellite data-relay processing network aimed at speeding up the flow of data from space.

Capnamic and Bayern Kapital co-led the round. Other investors participating in the round included ZOHO.VC, Robin Capital, BAB – Die Förderbank für Bremen und Bremerhaven, Mission E and KIEMIS Holding.

Founded in early 2026, NeuralSat’s satellite constellation will allow operators to offload computing and communications. According to the company, its network will deliver up to 50 gigabytes per second via optical and high-frequency radio links.

The network will support real-time edge processing, hosted workloads for commercial and defense clients and provide for time-critical missions like Earth observation and signals intelligence.

“We believe the next major evolution in space will…come from connecting satellites to shared infrastructure that enables them to communicate, access computing resources, and operate together,” Chief Executive Mohd Bilal said in a statement. “Just as the internet transformed how computers interact on Earth, we intend to transform how intelligence is connected and delivered in space.”

The company said the funding will help it accelerate plans to launch its first in-orbit demonstration node, planned for October 2027. After that, NeuralSat plans to begin rolling out commercial operational satellites.

The race to develop and build better connectivity and compute capabilities in space is on. Canadian startup Kepler Communications Inc. launched its first commercial space data relay service in January, allowing resilient data transfer and onboard computing, with a next-gen optical relay network announced in August. Skyloom, acquired by quantum computing firm IonQ Inc. in early 2026, deployed 84 optical terminals and a relay architecture in low Earth orbit.

Although space is not the optimal place to run processors, heat dissipation becomes a major issue because there is no air to carry it away, but space technology firms have developed solutions to radiate it from giant sails and other surfaces. Space-based compute may not replace terrestrial data centers, but it can enable edge compute given payload weight restrictions for orbital launch.

Starcloud Inc., formerly known as Lumen Orbit, raised $250 million in August at a $2.3 billion valuation. The company has already tested an Nvidia H100 graphics processing unit in orbit in late 2025, proving that it can scale to multi-satellite AI “data centers.” The company is now collaborating with Nvidia Corp. on upcoming space-grade chips.

Currently, data relay and compute processing in space reduce the need for other satellites to send data to Earth to complete workloads. Talking to a nearby satellite for edge compute can shave significant time off data transfers. Sending data down to Earth can take a round trip of 4 to more than 30 milliseconds; satellite-to-satellite is slightly faster, at 3 to 30 milliseconds.

The real boost comes from relaying between satellites rather than routing long distances on the ground to a data center and back, often via optical cable ground networks (which add additional lag). Over long distances across the globe, inter-satellite links are around 30% to 50% faster than sending signals down to Earth for processing.

Companies such as NeuralSat hope to use the edge of being right there, near the data production, to provide processing capabilities, or swift relay to a satellite closer geographically to terrestrial data center processing to reduce delays.

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