Robinhood co-founder's orbital AI startup Aetherflux seeks $2B valuation
What's the deal? Aetherflux, a California-based startup developing solar-powered orbital data centres, is in talks to raise $250 million to $350 million in a Series B round that would value the company at $2 billion.
Index Ventures, an existing backer, is leading the deal. The company has raised around $80 million since its 2024 founding, including a $50 million Series A from Index, InterlagosDealroom has a profile for this one. Try Dealroom →, Breakthrough Energy VenturesDealroom has a profile for this one. Try Dealroom →, and Andreessen Horowitz.
Aetherflux was founded by Baiju BhattDealroom has a profile for this one. Try Dealroom →, co-founder of Robinhood, who seeded the company with $10 million of his own capital. Its centrepiece is "Galactic Brain" — a planned constellation of satellites that would use continuous solar power and radiative cooling in low Earth orbit to run AI computations, bypassing the energy constraints that are throttling data centre construction on the ground.
Why now? Building a terrestrial data centre takes five to eight years from planning to operation. AI's energy demands are growing faster than the grid can accommodate — one estimate projects AI-driven energy demand rising 165% by 2030. Orbital data centres, if they can be made to work, sidestep the bottlenecks of real estate, permitting, and utility connections entirely.
Aetherflux is also repositioning. Having originally focused on beaming solar energy to Earth via infrared lasers, it has shifted emphasis toward orbital compute — a pivot driven by the recognition that putting the chips next to the power source in space is more economical than transmitting energy down to terrestrial servers. Its first data centre node is targeted for the first quarter of 2027.
What could go wrong? The technical challenges are formidable. Operating data centres in orbit requires solving heat dissipation, radiation hardening, latency, and economics at a scale that has never been demonstrated commercially. SpaceX, Blue Origin, and StarcloudDealroom has a profile for this one. Try Dealroom → are all racing toward the same space — with vastly greater resources.
Aetherflux is also in a mid-pivot moment, still developing its laser power-beaming satellite while simultaneously building an entirely different product category. At a $2 billion valuation, with no revenue and a first satellite still a year away, the gap between ambition and proof is wide.
The signal: The AI energy crisis is pushing capital into increasingly unconventional places. Orbital data centres represent the most extreme version of a broader trend — the search for power sources and compute infrastructure that can scale faster than Earth's constrained grid allows. That the idea is attracting serious institutional backing at nine-figure valuations signals how acute the problem has become.
Sources:
The Tech Buzz
TechCrunch
Mezha
The Wall Street Journal
Image credit:
Aetherflux
J.V.
