Cowboy Space raises $275M to build rockets for space data centers

The insatiable global appetite for AI compute is pushing data center entrepreneurs to look beyond Earth. There’s one critical bottleneck: there simply aren’t enough rockets to deliver these orbital facilities, and the ones that exist are prohibitively expensive.

Most industry players are betting that SpaceX’s Starship,potentially launching its twelfth test flight as early as this weekend,will eventually solve the problem. But even after Starship becomes operational, commercial availability could be years away, given SpaceX’s priority on its own satellite business. A similar challenge faces Blue Origin’s New Glenn, which failed to deploy a satellite during its third launch in April.

This leaves space data center ventures with two paths: targeting the mid-2030s, like Google Suncatcher, or starting small with edge processing for space sensors, as Starcloud is doing.

But there is a third, more radical option. “We’re standing up our own rocket program,” said Baiju Bhatt, CEO and founder of Cowboy Space Corporation, in an interview with TechCrunch. He anticipates the first launch before the end of 2028.

Today, the company announced the close of a $275 million Series B round at a post-money valuation of $2 billion, led by Index Ventures. Other participants include Breakthrough Energy Ventures, Construct Capital, IVP, and SAIC.

Bhatt, who co-founded the online stock platform Robinhood, originally launched this startup in 2024 under the name Aetherflux, with plans to harvest solar energy in space and beam it to Earth. The concept of space data centers led the company to pivot toward using that electricity in orbit. The practical realities of that effort, in turn, pushed him into rocket development and a new company name.

Bhatt explained that he spoke with multiple launch providers, hoping to find a path where his company would only build satellites. But he couldn’t secure enough launch capacity to scale an orbital data center business or achieve unit economics competitive with terrestrial alternatives.

“There’s a lot of new rockets coming online, but as we look three, four years out, it’s still very, very scarce,” he said. “I think you’re going to see a lot of the first party rocket providers actually specialize into their own payloads.”

Bringing the rocket in-house is logical, but it is also audacious. Only a handful of private companies in the West,primarily SpaceX, Rocket Lab, and Arianespace,consistently launch commercial rockets. Blue Origin and United Launch Alliance have struggled for years to drag their vehicles out of development. And startups like Stoke Space, Firefly Aerospace, and Relativity Space are still waiting to deliver operational systems.

This evolution puts Cowboy Space Corporation in direct competition with SpaceX and Blue Origin, the most advanced and well-funded players in the market.

“The prize here, and the size of this market, is big enough that there’s room for many players to succeed,” Bhatt said. “I see the demand for AI getting more and more acute, and I see the options on Earth getting more and more limited.”

One advantage, Bhatt argues, is the company’s laser focus on a single market,data centers,and its unique design. Orbital rockets typically have a booster stage that reaches the edge of space and a second stage that carries the payload to orbit. Cowboy Space plans to build its data centers directly into the second stage of its rocket. This approach is a throwback: the first U. S. satellite, Explorer 1, was built as the final stage of a rocket, packed with radio equipment and scientific instruments.

Building a rocket purpose-made for its own data-center satellites should simplify the design. Each satellite is expected to weigh 20,000 to 25,000 kilograms and generate 1 MW of power for nearly 800 onboard GPUs. That would make its rocket slightly more powerful than SpaceX’s Falcon 9, though smaller than the under-development Starship. Bhatt says he eventually expects the booster to be reusable.

Cowboy Space has hired space industry veterans, including former Blue Origin propulsion engineer Warren Lamont and former SpaceX launch director Tyler Grinne. The company also plans to build its own rocket engine, the most complex and expensive part of any launch vehicle. It is still working through key development needs, such as facilities for testing, manufacturing, and launching its rockets.

The new vision comes with a new name, meant to emphasize its mission to “power humanity from the high frontier.” Bhatt admits, “It gives me a reason to wear a cowboy hat and also grow this sick mustache.”