Orbit is fundable now.
Cowboy Space Corp. raised $275M in a Series B that values the company at $2B, bringing total outside funding to $355M. Index Ventures led. NEA and IVP joined alongside other institutional investors. The company builds AI data centers designed to operate in low-earth orbit, powered by orbital solar, no terrestrial grid required.
That’s not a metaphor. It’s the literal infrastructure thesis.
The CEO is Baiju Bhatt. He co-founded Robinhood Markets, which means he’s built one financial infrastructure platform that disrupted a legacy stack and successfully attracted mainstream institutional capital. Index Ventures, NEA, and IVP aren’t funding a moonshot fantasy, they’re funding a founder who has cleared the credibility bar before. That matters when the product is orbital data centers, a category where the natural reaction is skepticism.
Verification
Partial SiliconANGLE (T3, page content confirmed); TechCrunch (cited by Wire, not in verification report) Core financials confirmed. GPU/compute specs (~1MW, ~800 GPUs) are company-stated via TechCrunch only, not independently verified.The power argument is what makes this intelligible as infrastructure, not novelty. Terrestrial AI data centers face a compounding problem: hyperscalers are committing to hundreds of billions in capex, grid permitting is slow, and power purchase agreements for renewable energy are oversubscribed. Epoch AI’s 2026 tracking shows hyperscaler capex trending toward $770B annually, a number that assumes the power and land will exist. Orbital solar doesn’t have those constraints. Once a module is in LEO, it’s generating power continuously with no permitting battles, no grid interconnection queue, no water cooling requirements.
Company specifications, reported by TechCrunch but not independently verified, describe modules delivering approximately 1 megawatt of computing power via roughly 800 onboard GPUs. Those figures should be treated as company-stated until independent technical evaluation exists.
What’s confirmed: the $355M total funding, the $2B valuation, Index leading, and the orbital solar strategy. That’s enough to evaluate the investment thesis.
The real story is what this round signals for alternatives to terrestrial compute. The existing brief published here on the three data center power models laid out the orbit-vs-fuel-cell-vs-grid framework. Cowboy Space’s Series B doesn’t settle that comparison, but it moves orbit from “theoretically interesting” to “institutionally backed at $2B.” That’s a meaningful shift in the category’s credibility floor.
What to Watch
The company formerly operated as Aetherflux, according to company statements, that name change hasn’t been confirmed in source reporting but is consistent with company communications.
Watch the first orbital deployment date. The $355M in total funding covers significant development and launch costs, but orbital compute doesn’t work until it’s actually in orbit. The transition from capital raise to operational hardware in LEO is the test that matters. A successful first deployment would make Cowboy Space a comps anchor for every subsequent orbital infrastructure raise.