Cowboy Space Corporation, the startup founded by Robinhood co-founder Baiju Bhatt, has raised $275 million in a Series B at a $2 billion post-money valuation to do something almost no AI infrastructure company has attempted: build its own rockets to put data centers in orbit. Index Ventures led the round, with Breakthrough Energy Ventures, Construct Capital, IVP, and SAIC also participating. Bhatt told TechCrunch the company expects its first launch before the end of 2028. The pitch rests on a bet that there simply will not be enough commercial launch capacity to scale orbital compute any other way.
The company plans to fly satellites massing 20,000 to 25,000 kilograms, each generating 1 MW of power for just under 800 onboard GPUs. That puts the vehicle slightly above the lift class of SpaceX's Falcon 9 and below the in-development Starship. Cowboy Space intends to integrate the data center directly into the rocket's second stage, eliminating the usual separation between launch vehicle and payload.
"We're standing up our own rocket program," Bhatt said. The decision came after he canvassed launch providers and could not find enough commercial slots to make the unit economics of an orbital data center compete with terrestrial alternatives. "There's a lot of new rockets that are coming online, but as we look three, four years out, it's still very, very scarce, and I think that you're going to see a lot of the first party rocket providers actually specialize into their own payloads," he said.
Key facts
- 01Cowboy Space closed a $275M Series B at a $2B post-money valuation, led by Index Ventures.
- 02Each satellite is designed to mass 20,000–25,000 kg and supply 1 MW of power to roughly 800 onboard GPUs.
- 03Founder Baiju Bhatt expects Cowboy Space's first launch before the end of 2028.
- 04The startup, previously known as Aetherflux, was founded in 2024 by the Robinhood co-founder.
- 05Backers also include Breakthrough Energy Ventures, Construct Capital, IVP, and SAIC.
The supply problem is real. SpaceX's Starship is expected to make its twelfth test flight as soon as this weekend, but even once operational the vehicle will likely be tied up serving SpaceX's own satellite business for years. Blue Origin's New Glenn failed to deliver a satellite during its third launch in April. United Launch Alliance has been working through its own development backlog, and newer entrants — Stoke Space, Firefly Aerospace, Relativity Space — have yet to put operational systems into service. Rocket Lab and Arianespace round out the short list of Western companies launching commercial payloads on a consistent cadence.
“Each Cowboy Space satellite is designed to mass 20,000 to 25,000 kilograms and deliver 1 MW of power to just under 800 onboard GPUs — a data center built into a rocket's second stage.”— Jaeden Schafer
That scarcity is why competing orbital-compute schemes are either pushed far out or scaled down. Google Suncatcher is targeting the mid 2030s. Starcloud is starting with edge processing for space-based sensors rather than full data centers. Cowboy Space is trying to compress the timeline by owning the launch stack outright.
The startup originally launched in 2024 as Aetherflux, with a plan to harvest solar power in orbit and beam it to Earth. The pivot to data centers redirected that electricity to onboard compute rather than ground transmission, and the rocket program followed from the realization that no one else could lift the hardware fast enough. The rename, Bhatt said, reflects a mission to "power humanity from the high frontier" — and, he admitted, "it gives me a reason to wear a cowboy hat and also grow this sick mustache."
Cowboy Space has hired former Blue Origin propulsion engineer Warren Lamont and former SpaceX launch director Tyler Grinne. It also plans to build its own rocket engine, the costliest and most technically demanding component of any launch vehicle. Bhatt says the booster will eventually be reusable. The integrated-payload design has historical precedent: Explorer 1, the first US satellite, was built as the final stage of its own rocket.
Going vertical puts Cowboy Space in direct competition with SpaceX and Blue Origin, the two best-funded private launch operators in the West. Bhatt's response is that the market is large enough to absorb multiple winners. "The prize here, and the size of this market, is big enough that there's room for many players to succeed," he said. "I see the demand for AI getting more and more acute, and I see the options on Earth getting more and more limited."
The skepticism writes itself. A new orbital-class rocket typically takes a decade and several billion dollars to bring to operational status — Blue Origin, Stoke, Firefly, and Relativity have all been working for years and are still mid-development. Cowboy Space is also missing the manufacturing, test, and launch facilities it will need, and the $275M raised is a downpayment, not a full program budget. A late-2028 maiden flight on an in-house engine, second-stage-integrated payload, and reusable booster is an aggressive target by any measure.
The wager Cowboy Space is making maps cleanly onto where AI infrastructure economics are headed. Terrestrial data centers are running into grid interconnect queues, water permits, and local opposition. If demand for AI compute keeps compounding faster than utilities can build, orbital capacity stops looking like a science project and starts looking like a procurement category. Whether Bhatt's team can actually deliver a working rocket by 2028 is the harder question — but the funding round confirms a serious tier of investors now believes the alternative is worse than trying.
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