Philip Johnston is a British entrepreneur and business executive.[1][2][3] He is the co-founder and CEO of Starcloud, a space technology company developing orbital data centers, and previously co-founded Opontia, an e-commerce brand aggregator.[4][5]
From 2019 to 2021, Johnston worked as an associate at McKinsey & Company where he focused on satellite projects for national space agencies.[8][9]
In March 2021, Johnston co-founded Opontia alongside Manfred Meyer, an e-commerce brand aggregator focused on the Central & Eastern Europe, Middle East, and Africa (CEEMEA) region.[10] The company's business model centered on acquiring profitable e-commerce brands with monthly revenues exceeding $10,000.[10]
Johnston giving a TED Talk on orbital data centers, October 2025
In June 2021, Opontia raised $20 million in seed funding from Global Founders Capital, Presight Capital, Raed Ventures, and Kingsway Capital, along with angel investors including Tushar Ahluwalia, Jonathan Doerr (co-founder of Jumia), and Hosam Arab.[12]
In December 2021, Opontia raised $42 million in a Series A round, making it one of the largest Series A rounds in the region. The round was a mix of equity and venture debt, with STV leading the equity investment.[13][14][15] The company ranked 12th on Forbes Middle East's Top 50 most funded startups in 2021.[16] Opontia was acquired by Perfection in 2023.[citation needed]
In early 2024, Johnston co-founded Starcloud (originally named Lumen Orbit).[8][17] Starcloud is a US–based company that designs, builds, and deploys orbital data centers in space.[18]
Starcloud participated in Y Combinator's Summer 2024 cohort and raised approximately $21 million in seed funding by the end of 2024.[19] Investors include Y Combinator, NFX and In-Q-Tel, and the company is part of NVIDIA's Inception Program.[19] The company rebranded from Lumen Orbit to Starcloud in February 2025.[8]
In November 2025, Starcloud launched its first satellite, Starcloud-1, equipped with an NVIDIA H100 GPU, which the company reported as being 100 times more powerful than any GPU previously operated in space.[20][21] The satellite successfully trained NanoGPT, a large language model, marking the first time an LLM was trained in space.[21][22]
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