Baiju Bhatt

In May 2026, a four-year-old startup quietly changed its name to Cowboy Space Corporation and announced it had raised $275 million. The headline was the money. The story was the swerve. The company had started life as Aetherflux, built to harvest sunlight in orbit and beam it down to Earth with infrared lasers. Now it was talking about something stranger: rockets, and one-megawatt data centers that live in space and never touch the ground.

The person behind both the original idea and the swerve is Baiju Bhatt. Most people met his name through Robinhood, the zero-commission trading app he co-founded in 2013 that helped touch off the meme-stock era. He ran it as co-CEO until 2020, stayed on as chief creative officer, and walked away from the executive role entirely in March 2024. By then he had a board seat, a fortune, and a question that finance could not answer.

Space was not a midlife pivot for Bhatt so much as a return ticket. He grew up in Poquoson, Virginia, the only child of Gujarati immigrants. His father worked as a scientist at NASA's Langley Research Center - a man who had to abandon his doctoral studies when kidney failure hit soon after the family reached the United States. The household ran on the idea that knowledge was the one asset nobody could repossess. "Education is the one thing that I can control in my life," Bhatt has said. Space was simply the family business he came home to.

He studied physics at Stanford and stayed for a master's in mathematics, finishing in 2008. He also found Vlad Tenev there. The two bonded over problem sets, chess, and the gym before they ever bonded over a company. Their first ventures were finance software for Wall Street trading desks. The third try was Robinhood, and the insight was almost rude in its simplicity: if a phone could do everything a broker's terminal could, why was buying a single share wrapped in fees and friction?

Bhatt's job was the feel of it. He obsessed over the product - the tap, the confetti, the way a chart breathed. The Robinhood app won an Apple Design Award in 2015, a rare trophy for a finance company. The design was the moat. By 2018, a funding round valued the company near $6 billion and made Bhatt one of the youngest self-made billionaires in the country. The same year, Fortune put him on its 40 Under 40.

Then he did the thing that founders almost never do twice. He started over, at the bottom of a learning curve, in a field where the prototypes explode. Aetherflux, launched out of stealth in October 2024, set out to do what engineers have sketched since the 1960s and never shipped: collect solar power above the weather and the night, then send it down. The trick Bhatt's team chose was infrared lasers firing to small ground stations - power as a beam, not a cable. He seeded it with $10 million of his own money before outside capital arrived.

The capital arrived fast. In April 2025, Aetherflux closed a $50 million Series A led by Index Ventures and Interlagos, with Breakthrough Energy Ventures, Andreessen Horowitz, and NEA along for the ride. The company demonstrated power beaming in its lab and lined up a first orbital demonstration. The market liked the sci-fi. Bhatt, characteristically, kept doing the math.

The math is what produced Cowboy Space. As Bhatt worked the numbers on orbital infrastructure, he concluded that the economics only closed if the company controlled its own launch - so it would have to build rockets. And if you are flying your own hardware to orbit anyway, the most valuable cargo might not be a power transmitter but compute: AI data centers running on free, uninterrupted sunlight, cooled by the vacuum, with the rocket's upper stage doing double duty as the data center itself. The constellation has a name fit for the brand. They call it Stampede.

It is a big, strange, vertically integrated bet, and Bhatt seems to relish exactly that. The $275 million Series B in May 2026, led again by Index Ventures with IVP, Blossom Capital, and SAIC joining, valued the renamed company around $2 billion. The pitch reads like a teenager's notebook - solar lasers, orbital servers, a rocket named after a cattle drive. The cap table reads like grown-up conviction.

What ties Robinhood to a rocket company is not the subject. It is the instinct. Bhatt likes problems that are old enough to be embarrassing - things everyone agrees should work and nobody has made work. Commission-free trading was one. Power and compute that live off the planet is another. "Being an immigrant kid, your whole life is kind of a startup," he has said. He keeps acting like the runway is short and the destination is worth it anyway.