Baiju Bhatt co-founded Robinhood, the zero-commission trading app that put stock buying on a phone screen and made him one of the youngest self-made billionaires in the US. In 2024 he walked away from finance to chase the idea he grew up with: power and machines in orbit. His company, founded as Aetherflux and rebranded in 2026 as Cowboy Space Corporation, started by trying to beam solar energy to Earth with infrared lasers and has since aimed higher - building rockets and AI data centers that live in low Earth orbit. The son of a NASA scientist, Bhatt is a physicist and self-taught product designer who keeps picking old, stubborn problems and bringing capitalism to them.
Philip Johnston is the co-founder and CEO of Starcloud, the company putting AI data centers into orbit. In November 2025 his team flew an Nvidia H100 GPU to space aboard Starcloud-1, then trained the first large language model off-planet. Five months later the company raised a $170M Series A and became the fastest unicorn in Y Combinator history. A British applied mathematician and ex-McKinsey space-agency consultant, Johnston argues the cheapest place to build a gigawatt-scale data center is no longer Earth - it is low Earth orbit, where sunlight is free and the cold of space does the cooling.