AtherFlux, the space solar energy startup launched by Robinhood founder Baiju Bhatt, is in talks to raise $250 million to $350 million for a Series B round, which will value the company at $2 billion.
was raising money first reported by The Wall Street Journal, which said Index Ventures is leading the deal. AetherFlux has raised approximately $80 million since its inception in 2024. Aetherflux declined to comment.
Aetherflux has shifted its focus in recent months as it has pushed its power-generating technology toward space data centers, and away from the emphasis on power transmission to Earth with lasers that was its initial vision. Space companies like SpaceX, Blue Origin, StarCloud, and others are now developing new architectures for distributed computing in space.
“The record shows we never lifted our pivot leg — it was no trip,” Bhatt joked in an interview with TechCrunch last week. “The light bulb went off about a year ago, in fact, if you wanted to power AI with the technology we were thinking about, it would be more beneficial to actually put the chips in space rather than projecting power from space to a terrestrial data center.”
While the company plans to continue its experiments in laser power transmission on a satellite bus built by Apex Space, the company’s first data center satellite is expected to arrive in 2027. “Our goal is to create something that competes with terrestrial economics,” Bhatt said.
it won’t be easy.
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