Loft Orbital
"Space Made Simple"
US space infrastructure firm operating shared YAM satellite buses that hosted the first onboard demo of Google DeepMind's Gemma AI model in orbit.
Loft Orbital is a U.S. space infrastructure company that designs, builds, and operates a fleet of multi-mission satellite buses so that companies, governments, and research institutions can access space without building and launching their own spacecraft. Rather than selling a single satellite platform, Loft Orbital runs an infrastructure-as-a-service model: it manufactures standardized satellite buses under its YAM (Yet Another Mission) product line, integrates multiple third-party customer payloads onto a single spacecraft, and manages the full mission lifecycle, including launch, integration, and on-orbit operations, on the customer's behalf.
As of mid-2026 the company stated on its website that it has supported more than 60 customers across more than 25 deployed missions, with more than 15 AI-focused missions operational. Its most publicized recent mission is YAM-9, a satellite launched in fall 2025 that carries an NVIDIA Jetson Orin AGX GPU on board. In April 2026, Loft Orbital, together with NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, used YAM-9 to run a vision-language model, Google DeepMind's Gemma 3, directly on the spacecraft, enabling it to autonomously identify objects in Earth-observation imagery without first downlinking raw data to the ground. The company describes this as the first reported demonstration of a vision-language model operating autonomously aboard an Earth-observation satellite. Loft Orbital has also agreed to build, launch, and operate six additional satellites for EarthDaily, extending its hosted-payload business into commercial Earth-observation constellations, and currently operates roughly a dozen spacecraft in orbit.
The company operates a dedicated national-security business unit, Loft Federal, structured to be FOCI-mitigated (Foreign Ownership, Control, or Influence) so that it can serve U.S. government customers on sensitive missions; Loft Federal positions require U.S. citizenship. Loft Orbital's primary office is in San Francisco, California, with an integration and test facility in Golden, Colorado, and a European office in Toulouse, France.
Loft Orbital's tagline is 'Space Made Simple.' The company can be reached through dedicated press ([email protected]) and sales ([email protected]) email addresses, and it maintains official profiles on LinkedIn, X (formerly Twitter), Instagram, and YouTube. Publicly accessible sources did not confirm the company's exact founding year, total employee headcount, or founder names at the time of this profile, so those fields are left blank pending further verification.
Primary type & automation activities this supplier delivers:
Hub
Universal payload adapter providing standardized electrical, data and TMTC interfaces between customer payloads and Loft's satellite buses.
On-Orbit AI Platform
Cloud platform for developing, testing and tasking AI applications on Loft Orbital's fleet of LEO satellites using onboard sensors and compute.
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Contact Loft Orbital
WEBSITE
https://loftorbital.com/HEADQUARTERS
United States
Company Facts
Founded
2017
Primary Role
Manufacturer
Company Size
employees 100-500
Primary Region
North America
Annual Sales
-
Funding Stage
-
Funding Total
-
