Aetherflux, the space solar power company founded by Robinhood co-founder Baiju Bhatt, is negotiating a $250-350 million Series B funding round that would value the startup at $2 billion, according to a report by the Wall Street Journal. The deal is reportedly being led by venture capital firm Index Ventures.
Since its founding in 2024, Aetherflux has raised approximately $80 million. The company declined to comment on the fundraising news.
Strategic Shift from Power Transmission to Space Compute
In a significant strategic pivot, Aetherflux has recently de-emphasised its original vision of transmitting solar power to Earth via lasers. Instead, the company is now focusing its technology on powering data centres in space, a sector seeing growing interest from companies like SpaceX, Blue Origin, and Starcloud.
“Let the record show we never lifted our pivot foot — it wasn’t a travel,” Bhatt joked in an interview with TechCrunch last week, referencing the basketball rule. He explained the rationale: “The light bulb went off about a year ago that, actually, if you wanted to power AI with the technology that we were thinking about, it would be much more advantageous to actually put the chips in space, rather than project the power from space down to a terrestrial data centre.”
Roadmap and Future Plans
While continuing experiments in laser power transmission on a satellite bus built by Apex Space, Aetherflux's primary goal is now orbital data infrastructure. The company aims to launch its first data centre satellite in 2027.
“Our goal is to build something that competes with terrestrial economics,” Bhatt stated, outlining the commercial ambition behind the technological shift. This move aligns with broader industry trends developing novel architectures for distributed computing in space.