Sophia Space Selects Apex to Power Real-Time Computing in Orbit

Sophia Space Selects Apex to Power Real-Time Computing in Orbit

• June 29, 2026

PASADENA, CA - Mandala Space Ventures is proud to share that our portfolio company, Sophia Space, has selected Apex to supply a satellite bus for a planned in-orbit demonstration of its TILE (Thermal Integrated LEO Edge) compute modules in 2027.

Sophia Space will fly one of Apex's Nova bus platforms for the demo mission, marking a critical milestone on the company's path to bringing real-time orbital computing to enterprise, government, and defense customers.

The deal comes as the volume of data generated in orbit continues to grow, driven by new constellations designed to deliver persistent Earth observation, communications, security, and scientific insights. Traditional approaches are reliant on downlinking petabytes of data to ground stations, and simply cannot keep pace with mission-critical timelines, making a new layer of on-orbit edge processing essential. Sophia's TILE platform is built to solve exactly that problem: solar-powered, passively cooled, and optimized for AI inference directly in space.

"This is a force multiplier for Sophia Space's mission to bring orbital computing mainstream," said Rob DeMillo, CEO and Co-Founder of Sophia Space. "With Apex as our strategic bus supplier, we're bringing computing into orbit where it's needed most. This isn't just about faster data. It's about enabling satellites to make intelligent decisions autonomously, accelerating innovation across defense, commercial space, and Earth observation industries."

Leon Alkalai, CTO and Founder of Sophia Space, added: "We're building the backbone for the next era of space-to-space and space-to-Earth infrastructure. With Apex as a collaborator, satellites become autonomous computing hubs, able to act on data the moment it's generated."

Ian Cinnamon, Co-Founder & CEO of Apex, noted that Sophia's mission is precisely what the Nova platform was built for: "Sophia's vision for real-time orbital computing is exactly the kind of mission our Nova platform is designed to support, giving them a reliable, scalable path to bring edge computing capabilities to orbit."

A Two-Step Path to Orbit

The Apex demo is the second of two planned in-orbit validations.Scheduled for this fall, Sophia will first validate its orbital operating system, SOOS, aboard Kepler's in-space network. That demonstration will then directly inform the TILE hardware flight with Apex in 2027, during which TILE will interact with on-board sensor data, allowing engineers to test AI inference models for image processing and other mission-critical tasks.

Fresh Momentum: $7M in New Financing

Alongside the Apex announcement, Sophia is finalizing $7M in SAFE financing, with participation from EverGreen (the NVIDIA Alumni Investment Network), SparkLabs Group, and other investors. The round is expected to bring Sophia's total funding to $22M. Proceeds will be used to continue R&D investment, expand the engineering and sales teams, and build out a manufacturing pipeline for TILE at scale.

The announcement reflects a wider market reality that investors and industry observers are watching closely. The near-term revenue opportunity in space compute is squarely in edge computing with full-scale, revenue-generating orbital data centers expected to emerge in the late 2020s to early 2030s as launch costs fall and on-orbit manufacturing matures. Sophia's passively cooled, modular approach positions the company to capture that near-term window while building toward the longer-term orbital data center vision.

Sophia Space was founded by Dr. Leon Alkalai and incubated by Mandala Space Ventures with the vision of building scalable, space-based computing infrastructure for Low Earth Orbit. This latest deal with Apex is yet another step in that direction, and we are proud to support the team as they continue to grow.

To learn more about Sophia Space, visit sophia.space.

Media Contact:

Brian Monnin, [email protected]

Emma Way, [email protected]