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Ibadan, 7 March 2023. – Lonestar Data Holdings has closed a $5 million seed round, raising money from Scout Ventures, Seldor Capital, 2 Future Holding, The Veteran Fund, Irongate Capital, Atypical Ventures, and KittyHawk Ventures. The $5m includes funds that the Company raised last year as part of the round. According to the Company’s CEO, Christopher Stott, the funding will enable its first two missions in 2023, as the hardware is complete, with the Company only awaiting launch.
The startup hopes to deploy small data centers on the Moon and has scheduled its first mission for the second quarter of 2023. “We scheduled for this month, but NASA asked Intuitive Machines, our provider, to move their mission back and to change landing sites,” Stott explained. The landing site was moved last month to the lunar South Pole Region.
On the other hand, the second mission, also with Intuitive, will tentatively launch in Q4. The new funding “gets us to revenues from the Moon and well into our third planned mission in 2025,” Stott explained.
Scout Ventures’ founder and managing partner Brad Harrison added: “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.”
Lonestar also plans to send lightweight data center equipment to the Moon and will offer a disaster recovery backup service and Edge processing for missions based on the Moon. Initial deployments will be a server and storage module the size of a book, which will get its power from solar energy.
