From basketball, to space

Rama Afullo, a Kenyan born computer engineer, grew up in a high-achieving family buzzing with entrepreneurial energy and a flair for tech. “There’s about 12 or 13 PhDs in my family,” he says, laughing, “So it’s getting a bit intense!” His mother is a computer scientist and his father an electrical engineering professor, but he and his siblings were always encouraged to choose their own path. His younger brother, he points out, did a psychology undergrad, a business post grad, and then became a stuntman, and his older brother is a systems admin with an MSc to boot. As for Afullo? “I was going to be a basketball playing hip hop superstar,” he says. In the end, he discovered space.

Today, Afullo is the founder of Satlyt, a San Francisco-based computing startup building a new infrastructure for low earth orbit satellites. It’s been one year since he quit his job as a product manager at SpaceX (following a career at Tesla and Google) to pursue his vision and he is brimming with energy and optimism. More than 12,000 active satellites are currently orbiting the earth. Over the next five years, 70,000 more are expected to be launched. And in ten years, according to a base-case forecast by Goldman Sachs, the $15bn satellite market will be worth $108bn. “It’s going to blow up,” says Afullo. “And there are so many problems to solve.” 

The cloud backbone for space

With Satlyt, Afullo is focused on solving one particular problem; the challenge that satellites have communicating between each other. Satlyt, says Afullo, will be the “Above Cloud Service Provider”; a decentralized network that will enable satellites to communicate directly and process data far more efficiently as a result. By distributing processing power across a network of satellites, Satlyt enables this sort of work to be done from the edge, meaning the satellite itself can process and delete the unnecessary data – without expensive, time-consuming dependency on ground stations. 

Right now, says Afullo, there is no standardised communication protocol that enables satellites to be interoperable with each other regardless of manufacturer. “So we are creating that”. While companies like SpaceX have built a vertically integrated ecosystem for Starlink, Satlyt is horizontal and open-source. He describes it as, “the Android to Starlink’s iPhone”. Satlyt is designed to be uploaded to any satellite for the benefit of any operator, says Afullo, because it’s not just about improving satellite technology, but “democratizing” it.

NASA calling

The startup has already caught the eye of NASA. It was recently selected for the agency’s highly competitive Small Business Technology Transfer (STTR) program, which not only provides a financial boost, but also sets up NASA to be a customer once the technology is developed. Satlyt was also one of 17 startups selected for the new intake of the Google AI infrastructure academy, and is a finalist in the Saudi Arabia Space Up Challenge. The rapid progress has been boosted by early interest from Antler, which reached out to Afullo just a few weeks after he announced he was going to focus on Satlyt fulltime, and led a successful pre-seed funding round for the startup. 

“There's no experience like being rejected by investors and then figuring out that, actually, they were wrong.” 

The attention from NASA means a lot to Afullo. “I've always just had a reverence for NASA,” he says. “NASA's iconic, right?” He values the way the agency has always been a civilian organization, which speaks to his own ideals about space and his values back on earth. This is particularly the case as a black founder, which are few and far between in the space sector: “I think one of the reasons I love NASA, right, is because they push humanity above all.”

Being a founder, says Afullo – juggling the responsibility of being HR, admin, the tech guy and going out fundraising – can be tough. “But you're also putting something out there that's novel…that folks haven't seen before. And when you have that conversation and you see the eyes light up…that stuff can be really rewarding.” As he points out: “There's no experience like being rejected by hundreds of investors and then eventually figuring out that, hey, actually, they were wrong.” 

Ready to launch

Afullo has done the groundwork, now he’s building the commercial profile of Satlyt. He’s signed up numerous satellite operators and in Q4 will be on two commercial launches. Getting his tech up into space so quickly cannot be understated. 

“There's a lot of space companies who have never even touched space,” says Afullo. “So we want to break that barrier. And from there you start propagating across a bunch of different satellite operators. We built something that folks want on their satellites, right, and now we're gonna prove that it works as advertised.”