From fintech to space tech: Robinhood co-founder Baiju Bhatt is betting on space solar

As the interest in both space and solar grows, one startup aims to merge the two industries. By tapping into the momentum of the commercial space industry and the increasing demand for renewable energy, Robinhood co-founder Baiju Bhatt is on a mission to make space-based solar power a reality with his latest startup: Aetherflux. Today on Equity, Rebecca Bellan caught up with Bhatt to talk about his transition from fintech to deep tech and why he believes now is the right time to scatter solar power-collecting satellites across the skies. Listen to the full episode to hear more about: How Aetherflux approached funding as a bootstrapped startup (for now), and what investor interest in space-based solar looks like. The challenge of scaling tech that’s literally out of this world. And Bellan and Bhatt’s idea for a Burning Man light show. Equity is TechCrunch’s flagship podcast, produced by Theresa Loconsolo, and posts every Wednesday and Friday. Subscribe to us on Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Spotify and all the casts. You also can follow Equity on X and Threads, at @EquityPod. For the full episode transcript, for those who prefer reading over listening, check out our full archive of episodes here. Credits: Equity is produced by Theresa Loconsolo with editing by Kell. We’d also like to thank TechCrunch’s audience development team. Thank you so much for listening, and we'll talk to you next time. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Anthony Ha?

  This episode of Equity is brought to you by Schneider Electric. Schneider Electric, advancing energy tech.

• 0:17Rebecca Bellan?

  Hello and welcome back to Equity, TechCrunch's flagship podcast about the business of startups. I'm Rebecca Ballon and this is the episode where we bring on industry experts to help us home in on a trend in the tech world and dive deep. Over here at Equity, we've noticed a growing interest in two sectors in particular, space and solar. One startup hopes to combine the two by leveraging the tailwinds of both the commercial space industry and the world's need for renewable energy. So today, we're going to talk to Beju Bhath. He's the former co-founder at retail stock trading app Robinhood, but more recently, he's launched a new startup called Aetherflux and that's dedicated to space-based solar power. Baiju, welcome to the show.

• 0:54Speaker 02

  How's it going? Thanks for having me.

• 0:56Rebecca Bellan?

  Yeah, thanks so much for coming on. So for those who don't know, Baiju is the co-founder of Robinhood, a very popular stock trading app, and now the founder of Aetherflux. So what a shift. Can you tell me what inspired you to go from Robinhood, which is like fintech, to what your current company is, which is space-based energy?

• 1:14Speaker 02

  Absolutely. I mean, the story, the journey to space, perhaps, I think it started actually pretty early in my life. My family had this interesting trajectory where my dad, growing up in India, had wanted to study physics his whole life, been applying to PhD programs to get into graduate school to study physics in America because that was kind of the dream. From a little town in India, which I guess now is not such a little town, he gets into a PhD program at the University of Huntsville, Alabama, right before I was born. And I grew up with him studying physics there and then later on would go on to work at the NASA side of Langley Air Force Base, so NASA Langley. So I'd kind of grown up around the space industry and I think with all little kids I get to see the space industry,

• 1:57Speaker 02

  I kind of had this question about like, did the space industry happen before I was born, right? Because there weren't any moon landings happening or sort of like these amazing things that happened in the 60s when I was growing up. I kind of told myself I ended up going to study physics as an undergrad at Stanford, which is where I'd go on to to meet Vlad and start Robin Hood. But I had this passion that if commercial space was going to become a thing again in my life, it was something that I wanted to be a part of. So life took me towards physics first, then starting Robin Hood. And somehow I find myself wanting to work on space now, so.

• 2:32Rebecca Bellan?

  Yeah, really cool. So your plan is to launch, what is it? A constellation of satellites that are designed to collect solar power in low Earth orbit and then beam it to Earth using infrared lasers. Do I have that right?

• 2:43Speaker 02

  That's, that's right, yeah.

• 2:45Rebecca Bellan?

  Yeah, that's pretty interesting.

• 2:46Speaker 02

  And so the idea, so it's an old NASA Department of Energy idea from the 1970s of space solar power, which actually originally was, I think, first sort of coined in an old Isaac Asmau short story as a part of those publications called Astounding Science Fiction from the 1930s and 40s. But the idea was basically, can you collect solar power in orbit? And doing so actually has some benefits over collecting it on the ground. Benefits being that depending on which orbit you're in, you can stay in the sort of direct sunlight for nearly continuous amounts of time. And also you get, when you're in the sun, you get direct exposure to the sun. So you're outside of the atmosphere when you're collecting solar power.

• 3:30Speaker 02

  The benefits of having solar power in orbit, as I think was originally conceived by NASA back then, was that you'd be able to provide power on a nearly continuous basis to a ground location with solar power, which we obviously know when the sun sets, there's no solar power with terrestrial solar. So it's a cool idea from the 1970s. It doesn't exist. This is not a real part of society today. And so the, the starting point for this was, what's a direct path towards making base solar power a reality today? So our approach, it's not the, the old approach to space solar power. It's predicated on technology advancements that have happened in the ensuing 30, 40, 50 years and using available components that you can either buy commercially or with a

• 4:15Speaker 02

  little bit of modification and saying, can we do a first demonstration of this capability? So our approach is large constellation of satellites, which each individually collect power, beam that power down to ground stations. And the idea is the more satellites we have in orbit, the more capacity we're adding to an energy grid in orbit. So we kind of have this bold dream of building a great American energy company and a great American energy grid in orbit for the next generation. So big lofty ambitions.

• 4:49Rebecca Bellan?

  Yeah, pretty huge lofty ambitions and I lowkey wonder how many inventions came out of Asimov's, you know, science fiction mind. And specifically for this one, so as you had said, solar from space delivered to Earth. It's not impacted by the weather. You can position satellites to capture more light, you know, less land utilization. But it is less going to space. It's very expensive. It's time consuming. It's a lot. So how are you, I mean, you mentioned kind of using off the shelf parts. Like, how essential is something like that to scaling that? Or even getting to a point where you can test it, right? Because you haven't tested it yet.

• 5:24Speaker 02

  We started doing some testing in the lab. We're pretty early on in that process, but it's kicking off. Our big test for demonstrating this capability from orbit is targeted for next year.

• 5:35Rebecca Bellan?

  Wow. When did you found the company again? Because that seems like a tight turnaround.

• 5:39Speaker 02

  We're trying to do it very quickly. I started working on this full time when I left Robinhood, beginning early of last year. And the goal from the beginning was how do we make this happen? Like in a relatively short amount of time? How do we demonstrate this capability? Because once we do a first demonstration, then we're going to know all the things that we need to make better and we can start improving on it and really start figuring out what the path is towards making this technology much more available. But it starts with actually doing it. And so our approach has been, what is a direct path towards getting a first satellite in space that can do this? To do that, we didn't want to invent any new technology here. We wanted to use technology components that are already ready to go.

• 6:22Speaker 02

  Because if we wanted to get in the middle of trying to invent something new, that's not necessarily going to be possible in the timeframe that we're talking about.

• 6:29Rebecca Bellan?

  Yeah, I noticed that you have some people from Anduril working on your team. And Anduril is also, you know, defense tech company that also uses kind of like off the shelf parts to build its drones and stuff. So have you been kind of staffing out with people who have firsthand knowledge of how to, yeah, do exactly that pioneer tech using kind of standard parts?

• 6:49Speaker 02

  Yeah, I think that there's certainly a way of trying to do what we're doing where you can use very custom esoteric components and you could probably spend multiples of what we think we can do it for and have it take like five times or 10 times as long. I think you're exactly right. And the reason why this is so interesting is that there are companies like SpaceX and Anduril, then I'd probably put companies like Tesla in there as well, that have taken the sort of like industrial manufacturing of advanced technology and basically asked the question, why can't we just use like, for example, consumer grade electronics to do these things? Like, why do we have to have each component be so esoteric and so much more expensive than the versions that we use, for example, on our iPhones?

• 7:34Speaker 02

  That if you could just use those, you know, the way that you budget for these projects and the way that you kind of execute on them becomes totally different. So that is very much the mindset that we want to take.

• 7:45Rebecca Bellan?

  Yeah, it's kind of like going back to first principles, right?

• 7:48Speaker 02

  Mm hmm.

• 7:48Rebecca Bellan?

  A little bit.

• 7:49Speaker 02

  And I think as you look at our sort of architecture here, right? Kind of building on this point a little bit more, it kind of emphasizes those things, right? So even if you take a look at the power transmission system, which we're going to be using components that are available today for the laser power system. So we're going to be building off of components that are available either commercially or commercially available off the shelf. We're going to end up doing some customization, but these are laser systems that have been developed for things like metal cutting and being able to repurpose them for this application. It allows us to actually put a version of this technology in orbit relatively soon.

• 8:25Rebecca Bellan?

  How are you testing that? You said you're doing some lab testing. Are you doing a lot of simulation testing for something like this?

• 8:30Speaker 02

  Yeah, so we're going to do a full spectrum of testing from component testing to lab testing to environmental testing and all this leading up to the space demonstration. So it'll be sort of maturing the technology. So for example, one of the things that we're going to be doing is testing the effect of atmosphere on our power transmission and and actually measuring how does our system behave in different weather conditions, right? We're going to be testing different kinds of photovoltaics for all the different components and say, how do these perform when you use different frequencies of light, for example? So a full spectrum of testing that we're going to be iterating on on the ground and kind of step by step.

• 9:11Rebecca Bellan?

  And then what's your go to market strategy here? I mean, obviously, we're seeing with the advent of generative AI, we're seeing all these AI companies turning to nuclear, to solar power. I think Meta is recently saying they're turning to solar again. Stargate will use solar power to power the data centers. Like, do you think that AI companies will be like your number one customer?

• 9:32Speaker 02

  We're going to start out at first with what we think are going to be applications that get power to places that it's a little bit hard to get it to. So AI applications sort of providing large amounts of power to these very, very data intensive applications is something we want to build to. The thing that we see our technology being able to solve problems for within the first couple of years of this technology is kind of coming back to the architecture, right? We'll have a constellation of satellites that are in orbit. And when you kind of think about building a constellation, the idea is that you have satellites that are passing overhead constantly. So you'll have one satellite that's able to provide power. You know, it'll move out of the field of view. There'll be another satellite that provides power.

• 10:15Speaker 02

  But imagine being out in places like forward deployed military bases or remote mining applications where there's either very little infrastructure or that infrastructure is very hotly contested, right? We look at even the DoD market where we know that they spend about $14 billion a year annually on energy. And the bread and butter of that has been gasoline and diesel generators, right? So if you could say instead, say, hey, we've got a power receiver that you can take into the field. It's got a relatively small receiver aperture size, think five to 10 meters in diameter for the future state. And you already be able to bring something like this out in the battlefield

• 11:00Speaker 02

  or into a, you know, remote location and be able to connect to one of our satellites and be able to have it provide power around the clock. So imagine being able to provide power to a remote location. In the middle of the night with a solar satellite.

• 11:15Rebecca Bellan?

  So is it kind of like plugging directly into, you know, whatever, a power grid somewhere or something? Or would you need kind of energy storage to go along with this? How exactly would that work? Cause I think that's one of the limitations of solar a lot of the time is that it's not always being plugged directly into where it needs to go. And then you need to have some way to store it.

• 11:34Speaker 02

  We imagine our ground stations are going to be little power grids on the move. Or there are going to be little power grids that you could take out with you. So a receiver that's able to connect to satellites and get power. You know, we contemplated having different versions of this. So you could imagine having some battery capacity on the receiver as well. If, for example, there is some sort of interruption to the power, you can actually store some power on the ground side. The idea is, is that it's going to be much smaller than you would need if you were just collecting solar power out in the field. And the way that that's kind of expressed is how much energy density is kind of transmitted to the receiver spot on the ground. So that's one of the things that we care a lot about is having the more useful than just like lugging out solar panels in the middle of nowhere.

• 12:17Rebecca Bellan?

  Yeah, well, I was going to ask, like, it's such a large undertaking. I can understand a world where you, you go into space and collect solar for, you know, space stations, satellites, space-based infrastructure. But to send it back, like, is there not enough, you know, room on earth to set up solar panels? Like, what's the benefit of, of doing it from space? I mean, aside from the, the fact that you get kind of continuous access, or maybe that is the main benefit.

• 12:41Speaker 02

  Yeah, the benefits are you get solar power in a much more tactical way. You get it on demand, not knowing the sun is shining, but when you have line of sight to a satellite. We think that actually the way that we're going to be transmitting power, when the sun sets for a solar panel, like, it doesn't do anything, right? So that one use case, we immediately are able to kind of improve upon with a satellite orbit. Because you can actually have a satellite that's able to provide power still where it might be dark on the earth, right? Similarly, ground solar stations, if there's heavy duty weather coverage, they're going to be negatively affected by that. Our power system, depending on the frequency of light that we use to transmit power, there's going to be.

• 13:22Speaker 02

  Be some atmospheric effects from the clouds, but our beam of power is also relatively small. And so we're able to provide power potentially in between those interruptions from clouds and things like that. On top of that, if you think about like the actual just power that's delivered on the ground. You know, we think about applications like a solar rucksack. So a basically a pack of solar panels that a troop would carry on their back in the battlefield. Right. Imagine if instead of having to rely on the sun for that power, that we could make a miniaturized version of our receivers. Where an individual troop could actually just lay out some panels and get a quick charge directly from work. Like, that's the kind of like, dare I say it's space age sort of versions of this technology that I think are just really cool.

• 14:08Rebecca Bellan?

  It sounds like sci fi. It sounds like it'll be a long time to get there.

• 14:17Anthony Ha?

  Every company today is looking for an edge, better insights, faster decisions, greater resilience. But as AI drives new growth, it also creates new demands on energy and infrastructure. Schneider Electric is connecting energy, automation and digital technologies to help organizations make smarter decisions and operate more efficiently. Because the future won't be shaped by AI alone, it will be shaped by energy and industrial intelligence. Schneider Electric, advancing energy tech.

• 14:45Rebecca Bellan?

  What do you think about funding? So you are bootstrapping this company, right, with your Robin Hood winnings? Is that still correct? Have you got any investors lined up since we last connected?

• 14:54Speaker 02

  So nothing to talk about directly on on other investors. To start the company off, I bootstrapped it, which is correct. And the goal was to basically get the ball moving on this and to make it happen quickly. It's kind of the the timeframe of getting a first demonstration into orbit next year. And having a first principled view on how this technology could become a reality. Now, just to be clear, like this, we're talking about building a constellation of thousands or tens of thousands or I don't know how many satellites in the future. We definitely need more more investors than than me to make that happen. But my kind of goal of this was say, hey, this particular problem, I think, has been slugged. Done and hasn't had a real sort of like serious attempt made at it from an industrial perspective.

• 15:39Speaker 02

  Because if you go back and look at everything that's been written about space solar power, it's terrifyingly expensive.

• 15:44Rebecca Bellan?

  Hmm.

• 15:45Speaker 02

  I can talk a little bit more about this, right? Some of the prescriptions for space solar power originally called for building a single massive solar array space station in orbit, the size of a small city.

• 15:56Rebecca Bellan?

  That doesn't sound smart. That sounds like a lot.

• 15:59Speaker 02

  Yeah, we have.

• 15:59Rebecca Bellan?

  Sounds like a lot of work.

• 16:00Speaker 02

  Humans, we don't make stuff like that. I mean, we might someday, but like 2025 humans, like that's not something that's in our wheelhouse. Like, we can't just magically put up a city in orbit.

• 16:09Rebecca Bellan?

  Yeah, but a decentralized array, right? As as you're talking about, right? Just several, which, yeah, I guess maybe you needed like a today's mindset to kind of come up with that. We're consistently kind of decentralizing larger institutions, I think. But you don't have a lot of competitors in this space. There's space solar, I think they're doing something similar, but they're using high frequency radio waves instead of laser.

• 16:30Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 16:31Rebecca Bellan?

  To get it back. I think there's vertus solus. They have also developed space-based solar power generation system in a similar way to collect solar energy, convert it to microwaves for transmission to ground stations. But yeah, you don't have a ton of competitors in the field. Like as you, you know, you're a founder, so founders are always in investing mode, even when they're bootstrapped.

• 16:51Rebecca Bellan?

  How are you thinking about looking for investors for this? Like, are you looking at VC, which might be difficult? Because this is a high infrastructure, kind of a long-term play. Often VCs want to see a tighter turnaround. How are you thinking about this?

• 17:06Speaker 02

  Yeah, first on the topic of competition, there's something kind of interesting here where there's the community of people that are working on this, where I think we all want to see space solar power be a reality, right? So I think there's a positivity around like wanting to make this happen because.

• 17:21Rebecca Bellan?

  It's cool, because it's really cool.

• 17:24Speaker 02

  In addition to the commercial efforts like us, there's also a bunch of academic work that's being done on it. For example, there's a group out of Caltech that's been working on this for a long time. So I just kind of say this to say like, we want to do our part in making this happen. We think we've got an approach that's going to be really effective, breaking ground and maturing the technology. So kind of. For space solar power to happen. So the second part is like the sort of capital ecosystem for space. I think that there's like a cool opportunity here in that the ecosystem for space. I think it's gonna be way more mature in a couple of years. And I think the thing that's gonna be one of the biggest drivers is gonna be access to orbit. I fundamentally believe that space from a commercial standpoint should be thought of as a platform, right?

• 18:07Speaker 02

  As a platform for distributing different kinds of goods and services. And the reason I kind of have that mindset is because that's kind of how I thought about Robin Hood on on mobile platforms, right? Mobile was a platform to distribute the financial services products that we were building. If you think about space and access to orbit in that same sort of way, you can kind of imagine how you can have like a commercial ecosystem that like builds around that platform.

• 18:31Rebecca Bellan?

  So like Starship as a platform.

• 18:33Speaker 02

  Bingo. Yeah. You know, that still remains to be proven out, but like when I kind of look into the future, like that's an opportunity that I think that. I mean, you don't have to be super imaginative here, right? You can imagine how tons of companies can build on top of that where stuff that was never really possible before you're like, hey, there's a rideshare to space. Who wants to get on and ride out?

• 18:52Rebecca Bellan?

  Well, that's kind of, it's a natural progression for commercialization of space and kind of just like really getting as much asset utilization out of that rocket as you can, right?

• 19:00Speaker 02

  The big shift that's happening here, I mean, this has kind of been happening for a while. Space has been something that only nation states do. Like it's been a NASA thing, right? It's amazing that to have a government that's supportive of this, but if you want to make it happen quickly, we've got to use American capitalism. Like that's the, that's the special part about our society.

• 19:18Rebecca Bellan?

  Yeah, I guess it's been a government thing for so long as well because of potential national security risks, right? If anyone with enough money can access the types of data that you can get from from low orbit satellites. Yeah, I can, I can imagine that would be a problem.

• 19:31Speaker 02

  And space from its very genesis in human society, right? Like the Western version of space, you could make a pretty strong argument, like didn't kick off at earnest until Sputnik. And that was a, that was a national security thing. So I think space has always kind of had that component to it. But the thing is, if you bring American capitalism to the mix, just like stand aside, amazing shit's gonna happen. Pardon my language. Like, American capitalism is the thing that I think pushes innovation and progress and builds the world around us that we're so proud of. Like, let's do that in space.

• 20:04Rebecca Bellan?

  Yeah.

• 20:04Speaker 02

  That's kind of the mindset I'm bringing to it.

• 20:06Rebecca Bellan?

  Yeah. Well, you know, speaking of national security risk, when they hire a lot of space companies that I've spoken to, when they hire people, they have to, at certain levels, you need to get kind of a security clearance because of maybe who you're contracting for or whatever. Is that something that you've had to think about yet? Or you're just really in the, in the tech phase of everything?

• 20:22Speaker 02

  So we're still getting started. You know, nothing specific to talk about there just yet, but you can kind of imagine the ecosystem space is going to have a lot of sensitive applications. And again, I think for this point, I'll emphasize also commercial applications. One more point on this. I think I've, I've said this a couple of times on a couple of other podcasts, but I think it's a big part of what I believe here is that if you could stand up another vertical of commerce and space, it's going to open up the doorways for a generation of aspiring entrepreneurs, people that want to work on space, like the next generation of people to say, hey, if I want to work in the space industry, there's actually commercial opportunities here outside of like defense, earth and imaging and telecommunications.

• 21:07Speaker 02

  If you get an energy industry in space, there's a few other industries that are like on the doorsteps of popping up in space too. You'll just have people from different walks of life saying, hey, maybe I'll get a degree in aerospace engineering and like want to do that with my life. Cause we just saw that for the last 10 years with computer engineering. Why can't we do that with space engineering?

• 21:28Rebecca Bellan?

  Yeah, definitely. Before we kind of start to close out, I wanted to ask you, this little slight gear shift back to the funding landscape. Do you have any, like, there are going to be other founders out there listening to this who have maybe exited their companies and also have money and want to do something cool with it. Like, do you have any tips that you've learned that you've picked up so far about bootstrapping, and particularly with something as, you know, pioneer tech as this?

• 21:51Speaker 02

  Yeah, there's a lot of really good ideas out there that nobody's working on. There's also a lot of really terrible ideas out there that nobody's working on, but there's a big blank space of stuff that's not actively being competed on. You know, I mean, that's kind of where my head is at, right? Like when I kind of see so much interest in, in AI, it's like, well, there's a lot of really smart people working on that. Let's make sure there's some smart people. Hopefully working on some of these other problems as well. The thing with space, like my two cents, I think outside of the box. Like this is a, in my opinion, at least a relatively sort of like nascent ecosystem. So we don't have to just do telecommunications in space. Like we can do other things and there's other novel applications that are out there. That'd be kind of my two cents.

• 22:33Rebecca Bellan?

  Yeah.

• 22:34Speaker 02

  Also, the realm of what's possible, I'll add one more thing. Having a first principled view on like what the actual driving cost of things are.

• 22:42Rebecca Bellan?

  Yeah, a lot of research, I think, would have to go into that, which should go into any company that you start.

• 22:46Speaker 02

  Mm hmm.

• 22:47Rebecca Bellan?

  Now, last time we spoke, you mentioned that one of the first, I don't know, demos or something that you're planning to do for this would have to do with Burning Man. Can you share anything about that?

• 22:56Speaker 02

  Oh, yes. There may be a first demonstration of the technology that happens in the desert and there may or may not be a really cool light insulation ball, but.

• 23:07Rebecca Bellan?

  I'm imagining like, you know, when you take a magnifying glass and start like burning something with the sun. I'm imagining that, but with a satellite and that's how, and that's how the burning structure erupts into flames.

• 23:20Speaker 02

  I'm imagining more like an art car situation, not, not a Burning Man structure. I'm thinking more Burning Man, like the festival, but not actually, not actually that.

• 23:28Rebecca Bellan?

  Wait, do they not burn a giant effigy?

• 23:30Speaker 02

  There is a big giant effigy at the festival, but the thing I want to do is light up some light insulation in the desert.

• 23:35Rebecca Bellan?

  That sounds safer. That's probably better.

• 23:37Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 23:38Rebecca Bellan?

  Um, okay. Well, Baiju, thank you so much for coming on the show. Where can our listeners find you?

• 23:43Speaker 02

  I think the place to find me is probably on X, formerly Twitter. So my handle is BejuBot, just like my name, and check out Aetherflux as well.

• 23:51Rebecca Bellan?

  Great. And I'm on Blue Sky. I'm on X and you can always find Equity at EquityPod. Thank you, our listeners. We will talk to you next time.

• 24:03Rebecca Bellan?

  Equity is produced by Teresa Locan Solo with editing by Kel. We'd also like to thank TechCrunch's audience development team. Thank you so much for listening and we'll talk to you next time.