Aetherflux, the area solar energy startup launched by Robinhood co-founder Baiju Bhatt, is in talks to lift $250 million to $350 million for a Sequence B spherical that will worth the corporate at $2 billion.
The fundraising was first reported by The Wall Avenue Journal, which mentioned that Index Ventures is main the deal. Aetherflux has collected about $80 million since its founding in 2024. Aetherflux declined to remark.
Aetherflux has shifted focus in current months because it pushed its power-generating know-how towards area knowledge facilities, deemphasizing the transmission of electrical energy to the Earth with lasers that was its beginning imaginative and prescient. Area firms like SpaceX, Blue Origin, Starcloud, and others at the moment are growing novel architectures for distributed compute in area.
“Let the file present we by no means lifted our pivot foot — it wasn’t a journey,” Bhatt joked in an interview with TechCrunch final week. “The sunshine bulb went off a few 12 months in the past that, truly, for those who wished to energy AI with the know-how that we have been eager about, it could be rather more advantageous to really put the chips in area, quite than mission the ability from area right down to a terrestrial knowledge middle.”
Whereas the corporate plans to proceed its experimentation in laser energy transmission on a satellite tv for pc bus constructed by Apex Area, the corporate’s first knowledge middle satellite tv for pc is predicted in 2027. “Our aim is to construct one thing that competes with terrestrial economics,” Bhatt mentioned.
It gained’t be straightforward.
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