St. Pete startup raises $5M for data centers on the Moon

St. Petersburg-based Lonestar Data Holdings Inc. has closed a seed round to help fund its mission of establishing data centers on the Moon, expanding data storage opportunities for the government and private ventures. 

The data analytics startup, headquartered in the Maritime and Defense Technology Hub, raised more than $5 million through a seed round led by Texas-based Scout Ventures and joined by Seldor Capital. The Veteran Fund, 2 Future Holding, Irongate Capital, Atypical Ventures and KittyHawk Ventures also participated in the round. 

“The funding will be split evenly between building the actual hardware and installing it on the Moon through the upcoming space missions. In 2025, we expect to have larger data centers and edge processing,” CEO and founder Chris Stott said.

“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,” Scout Ventures’ Founder and Managing Partner Brad Harrison said in a statement regarding the new investment. “Data security and storage will be a necessary part of leading the new generation of lunar exploration.”

Stott, who founded Lonestar in 2018 and previously worked at some of the leading aerospace and tech companies in the world, including Boeing and Lockheed Martin, explained the data centers consist of connected servers transferring digital data.  

Lonestar’s data centers will be focused on remote data storage and disaster recovery, allowing people to back up data and store it on the lunar surface, Stott said.

This year, Lonestar will be testing its proof-of-concept data center on the Moon inside a robotic lander as part of space exploration company Intuitive Machines’ upcoming lunar missions. 

The company previously signed a contract with SpaceX to launch several lunar lander missions with a Falcon 9 rocket.

Intuitive Machines’ first mission will take place in June.  

The second mission, IM-2, is scheduled to take place in October. Through the second mission, Lonestar plans to have a standalone physical data center on the Moon as a prototype that can store 16 terabytes of data. 

Today, Lonestar’s hardware is currently being built at a satellite office in California. 

Lonestar has a small team working inside the Hub; however, Stott expects those numbers to ramp up following the upcoming space missions. 

Stott said when the commercialization fully launches, he will also start a Series A round to raise additional funds.