Bay Area-based Aetherflux to join Seattle space race with new hub for satellite development

Aetherflux, a Bay Area-based space startup, is expanding to Seattle to open what it calls a “core center for satellite development.”

In a post on LinkedIn last week, Aetherflux said its team is growing and the company is currently hiring across all disciplines, from engineering to operations.

Founded in 2024 by CEO Baiju Bhatt, the billionaire co-founder of the trading platform Robinhood, Aetherflux is currently focused on creating an orbital data center satellite. The company says the goal is for its constellation of satellites — which it calls “Galactic Brain” — to leverage solar power in space to address the massive energy needs on Earth for artificial intelligence. The first data center node for commercial use is targeted for launch in 2027.

The startup will join a robust aerospace community of companies big and small in the Seattle area and beyond. They include Blue Origin, Stoke Space, Aerojet Rocketdyne, Starfish Space, Starcloud, Xplore and many more.

SpaceX, which produces satellites for its Starlink broadband constellation from its Redmond, Wash., facility, is seeking approval from the Federal Communications Commission for its plan to put up to a million satellites in orbit to process data for artificial intelligence applications.

Amazon produces satellites for its Amazon Leo broadband satellite network in Kirkland, Wash.

AI companies have been considering the idea of using solar-powered data center satellites to get around the limiting factors for ground-based facilities, such as rapidly growing requirements for electrical power as well as the availability of water for cooling systems.

“The race for artificial general intelligence is fundamentally a race for compute capacity, and by extension, energy. The elephant in the room is that our current energy plans simply won’t get us there fast enough,” Bhatt said in December. “Galactic Brain puts the sunlight next to the silicon and skips the power grid entirely.”

Aetherflux raised $50 million in a Series A funding in April 2025. The round was led by Index Ventures and Interlagos, with participation from Bill Gates’ Breakthrough Energy Ventures, Andreessen Horowitz, and NEA, according to TechCrunch. Total funding to date is $60 million.

Based in San Carlos, Calif., and Washington, D.C., Aetherflux’s team includes people who’ve worked at Robinhood, SpaceX, NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Anduril and the U.S. Navy.

Aetherflux has attracted to attention from the U.S. military. The company was awarded funding from the Department of Defense’s Operational Energy Capability Improvement Fund (OECIF) to develop space solar power for the military.

The Seattle-area company that comes closest to Aetherflux’s target market is Redmond-based Starcloud, which is working to put a network of data center satellites in orbit. In a LinkedIn post, Starcloud CEO Philip Johnston hailed Aetherflux’s Seattle plans as a positive sign for the region’s space industry. “Welcome to the neighbourhood, Aetherflux! … Did we kick off a new trend for space startups?” Johnston wrote.

GeekWire reached out to Aetherflux to learn where its Seattle hub will be located and how many people it hopes to employ. We’ll update when we hear back.