(Originally posted by EverGreen - The NVIDIA Alumni Investment Network)

There's a moment in every technology cycle when the infrastructure layer becomes undeniable — when the physics of the problem demands a fundamentally new approach, and the window to back the right team is open. We believe we're in that moment for orbital computing. And we believe Sophia Space is the company built to define it.

EverGreen is the NVIDIA Alumni Investment Network — founding partners and hundreds of investors and advisors who spent years inside NVIDIA building the GPU stack, the AI platform, and the ecosystem around it. We back companies at the frontier of AI infrastructure, and we bring something most funds can't: a network of operators who've lived the technical problems these founders are solving.

We’re a proud member of the NVIDIA VC Alliances program, sitting at the intersection of frontier capital and the world's most important AI platform. That vantage point shapes every investment we make. When we evaluate a company, we aren't just asking whether it's a good business. We're asking: does this push the frontier of AI infrastructure forward in a way that only a founder with rare technical conviction could pull off? Sophia Space answered that question emphatically.

THE SPACE WE'RE IN

The data center industry is hitting a wall. Hyperscalers, Neoclouds, Enterprises and Sovereigns are all racing to build capacity, but they're running into hard physical limits: power grids at capacity, communities pushing back on land and water use, and cooling systems that can barely keep pace with modern GPU & compute demands. At the same time, thousands of satellites are generating petabytes of raw sensor data every day, and the bandwidth to bring that data back to Earth will never catch up to the volume being produced.

The answer, increasingly, is obvious: process the data where it's generated. In orbit.

This isn't fringe thinking anymore. At NVIDIA's 2026 GTC Conference, Jensen formally announced NVIDIA's push into space computing — launching the Space-1 Vera Rubin Module and Jetson Orin/Thor platforms to enable AI workloads in orbit, and naming Sophia Space as one of a small handful of companies leading the charge.

The orbital data center "space race" is no longer a thought experiment. It's a market in formation, with nation-states, hyperscalers, and defense agencies already moving fast. China has 12 satellites in its sovereign compute constellation and plans for exascale capacity. The U.S. government is funding real-time ISR processing in orbit under the "Golden Dome" defense framework.  and Sophia's architecture, designed from the ground up for edge inference in constrained orbital environments, is precisely what those programs need.

WHY SOPHIA, AND WHY NOW

When we dug in, a few key things stood out.

The technology is genuinely differentiated.

Most companies attempting orbital computing are trying to force terrestrial data center architectures into space — active cooling loops, massive radiators, monolithic structures. The physics don't cooperate. Sophia took a different path. Their modular "Tile" architecture — 1m x 1m solid-state compute units powered by integrated solar arrays, passively cooled using a proprietary Caltech/JPL-licensed thermal stack — is designed from the ground up for the orbital environment. No moving parts. No fluid loops. 92% of collected solar energy routes directly to compute. A single Tile delivers system-level efficiency of 2.2–2.7 TOPS/W — meaningfully better than a terrestrial GPU data center. That's not an incremental improvement. That's a physics-first rethink of what an orbital based server can be.

The IP moat is real.

Sophia holds exclusive Caltech licenses covering a set of key patents across solar power, deployable structures, and high-efficiency thermal arrays — co-developed with JPL. Significant additional proprietary patents across hardware, software, manufacturing, mechanical are in active development. This is the kind of deep scientific foundation that doesn't get replicated quickly, and it gives Sophia a leading starting position as the market scales.

The business model is capital-efficient by design.

Rather than burning massive capital to launch a proprietary constellation, Sophia enters the market as a tech provider of fundamental hardware and software building blocks— selling Tile compute modules and the operating system that ride as payloads on existing satellite operators' hardware, avoiding the CapEx valley of death and generates real cash flow before Sophia transitions to full Orbital Data Centers post-2030.

The ecosystem alignment is exceptional — and it starts with NVIDIA.

Sophia is a member of NVIDIA Inception and an NVIDIA Jetson partner, both of which have been genuinely instrumental in accelerating Sophia's technical roadmap and go-to-market. We want to give a particular shoutout to Howard Wright on the Inception side and Sydney Sykes from NVIDIA VC Alliance Program, both of whom have been exceptionally helpful throughout this process and exemplify the best of what NVIDIA's ecosystem programs can do for founders. Sophia's CEO Robert DeMillo was personally featured alongside NVIDIA's Space-1 launch at GTC 2026. Sophia has secured formal distribution agreements with key players in the space ecosystem, with MOUs from a dozen more. In April 2026, Sophia and Kepler announced a formal agreement to deploy Sophia's SOOS operating system on Kepler's in-orbit compute network — the first live validation of Sophia's software in space, targeting AI weather forecasting and EO analytics workloads. When Sophia's CEO told Payload Space, "If our systems were available for sale tomorrow morning, they'd be sold out" — we believed him.

THE TEAM

We've built enough businesses and backed enough technical founders to know that the team is often the thesis. Sophia's team is exceptional.

Rob DeMillo (CEO) is a 9x founder with 7 exits, including a CTO role at Nimble Collective (acquired by Amazon), with earlier experience at JPL and Lincoln Labs. He combines operator credibility with genuine space heritage. @Dr. Leon Alkalai (CTO) is a formerNASA/JPL Fellow and Caltech patent co-inventor — and one of the architects of the IP Sophia is commercializing. Brian Monnin (CCO) brings 4x founding experience and commercial leadership from Microsoft and Intel. Jim Chase (VP Engineering) is a former SE Chief Engineer at NASA JPL.

Their advisory bench includes former NASA Administrator Dan Goldin and former SpaceX VP Hans Koenigsmann. This is not a team that read about space computing — they built the foundational science behind it.

WHY EVERGREEN

The alignment here runs deeper than thesis fit. EverGreen exists to back companies expanding the AI ecosystem — and there is no cleaner expression of that mission than a company bringing NVIDIA-powered AI compute to orbit. We have a front-row seat to where the AI platform is heading, and Sophia sits squarely at its frontier. Our network of NVIDIA alumni understands the GPU stack, edge computing, and the infrastructure challenges at the frontier of AI. That expertise is directly applicable to Sophia's technical roadmap, its GTM motion, and its path forward.

We are proud to back Sophia Space, and we're excited to be part of the next chapter of what computing infrastructure becomes.

EverGreen is the NVIDIA Alumni Investment Network, backing founders with early capital and deep GPU and industry expertise. Join us! Learn more at evergreenfund.net.