Baiju Bhatt co-founded Robinhood and spent a decade making stock trading accessible to everyday investors. Now he is trying to solve a different kind of infrastructure problem, one that starts not on Wall Street but about 250 miles above it. His company, Cowboy Space Corporation, builds solar-powered data centers designed to operate in Low Earth Orbit, with the rocket that delivers them and the hardware that runs inside them engineered as a single vehicle from the start.
The energy problem facing AI is real and getting harder to work around. In key US markets like Virginia, connecting a new data center to the power grid can take four to seven years. A RAND Corporation report published in early 2025 estimated that AI data centers could require as much as 68 gigawatts of power by 2027, a figure close to California's entire generation capacity. Industry analysts writing in 2026 have described electricity demand from AI as rising faster than the US grid was built to support. For companies planning where to build and what workloads to run, power availability has become a primary constraint, not a secondary one.
Against that backdrop, Cowboy Space Corporation has raised $275M in Series B financing at a $2B valuation. Index Ventures led the round. New investors IVP, Blossom Capital, and SAIC joined alongside existing backers Breakthrough Energy Ventures, Construct Capital, Andreessen Horowitz, NEA, Interlagos, and Bhatt himself.
Most satellite companies treat the rocket as a delivery vehicle and the satellite as its cargo. Cowboy Space takes a different approach. The rocket's upper stage, the section that reaches orbit, is the data center. Once in space, each upper stage becomes a one-megawatt computing facility with active thermal management and hardware built specifically for conditions in orbit. By merging these two components, the company eliminates the structural redundancy that typically adds weight and reduces how much usable compute actually makes it off the ground.
The company is also working with NVIDIA to deploy NVIDIA Space-1 Vera Rubin Modules on its satellites. These are AI computing modules designed for the space environment, part of an effort to bring high-performance processing capacity directly into orbit.
"Cowboy is building at exactly the right moment, as demand for AI compute and energy begins to outstrip what terrestrial infrastructure can support. Baiju has a proven track record of reimagining massive markets from first principles, and his lifelong passion for physics makes space the ultimate market opportunity for that ambition." — Jan Hammer, Partner at Index Ventures
The company's first major milestone is a satellite launch planned for later this year. The mission is designed to demonstrate space-to-Earth power beaming, transmitting energy collected by solar panels in orbit down to receivers on the ground. If it works, it would serve as a proof of concept for the broader system Cowboy is building.
The new capital will also go toward developing Stampede, the company's planned constellation of orbital data centers. Each launch is designed to add to a growing network, increasing total compute and power capacity over time rather than deploying one-off satellites. Cowboy's engineering team includes people who previously worked at SpaceX, Astranis, NASA, Amazon Kuiper, and NVIDIA, and the company expects that team to grow as it moves from demonstration to wider deployment.
The company was founded in 2024 under the name Aetherflux and adopted its current name alongside this funding announcement. Bhatt co-founded Robinhood in 2013 and served as its co-CEO until 2020. He left the company in early 2024 to focus on the space venture. His father worked as a scientist at NASA's Langley Research Center, and Bhatt studied physics and mathematics at Stanford before building a career in financial technology.
The satellites collect solar energy in orbit, where sunlight is continuous and unobstructed, and use it to power computing hardware directly in space. That means the processing happens above the atmosphere, bypassing the grid constraints that are slowing down data center construction on the ground. Cowboy Space is headquartered in San Carlos, California.
"Our approach starts from a blank sheet, where the unique requirements of data centers in orbit drive the form and function of the overall system. The rocket and the data center are a single design from day one. It's a first-principles departure from the traditional constellation model." — Baiju Bhatt, Founder and CEO of Cowboy Space Corporation
The investor lineup covers enterprise technology, deep tech, and defense. SAIC, a defense and technology services company, is a new addition to the cap table, and its involvement points to potential interest from government and national security customers. Several investors in this round also backed the company during its earlier fundraising under the Aetherflux name, including Index Ventures, Andreessen Horowitz, and Breakthrough Energy Ventures.
