Funding for the company formerly known as Aetherflux accelerates the delivery of AI compute in space at commercial scale

Cowboy Space Corporation, the orbital infrastructure company founded by Robinhood co-founder Baiju Bhatt, today announced $275M in Series B financing at a $2B valuation led by Index Ventures, with participation from new investors IVP, Blossom Capital, and SAIC, alongside existing investors Breakthrough Energy Ventures, Construct Capital, Andreessen Horowitz, NEA, Interlagos and Baiju Bhatt. The company, which operated as Aetherflux since its founding in 2024, is also unveiling its new name and brand.

Cowboy Space Corporation is pioneering vertically integrated infrastructure to power and run AI compute in orbit, opening a new frontier for high performance computing as terrestrial capacity strains under AI demand. The company is developing a constellation of Low Earth Orbit satellites that harness solar energy, a purpose-built launch vehicle to deliver them and compute payloads designed specifically for the space environment. The rocket’s upper stage and data center payload are designed as a single vehicle — not as a workhorse and its freight — eliminating redundant mass and optimizing power and compute delivered to orbit. In orbit, each upper stage becomes a 1-megawatt data center.

Cowboy is also collaborating with NVIDIA to deploy NVIDIA Space-1 Vera Rubin Modules, bringing state-of-the-art AI infrastructure to the Low Earth Orbit environment.

“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,” said Baiju Bhatt, founder and CEO of Cowboy Space Corporation. “The rocket and the data center are a single design from day one. It’s a first-principles departure from the traditional constellation model.”

“Cowboy is building at exactly the right moment, as demand for AI compute and energy begins to outstrip what terrestrial infrastructure can support,” said Jan Hammer, Partner at Index Ventures. “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. We’re excited to back the team as they execute on this vision.”

The company plans to launch its first satellite to orbit later this year to demonstrate space-to-Earth power beaming. Its team includes engineers from SpaceX, Astranis, NASA, Kuiper and NVIDIA.

Source:BusinessWire