From Robinhood to Rockets: Baiju Bhatt on Orbital Data Centres
Key points
Key takeaways from Grit interview with Cowboy Space Corporation CEO Baiju Bhatt (August 2026):
From Robinhood to rockets. After co-founding Robinhood in 2012 with Vlad Tenev, Bhatt walked away from the executive seat and began building a space company almost immediately, a pull he traces to his physics-and-math roots, and a desire to democratise finance for all.
The LEO platform thesis. Just as his Robinhood thesis was that mobile was an emerging platform for finance, his Cowboy Space bet is that low Earth orbit is a platform for commercial activity, starting with AI data centres, which he expects to become the centre of future energy demand, and extending to space-to-space power delivery for orbital AI workloads.
The upper stage is the data centre. Cowboy Space treats its rocket upper stage and its compute payload as a single unified vehicle, using the metal mass as a heat sink rather than discarding it, so each upper stage can become a roughly one-megawatt orbital data centre once it reaches orbit. Extreme vertical integration, designing and building its own rockets and orbital hardware, is meant to sidestep launch bottlenecks.
Seeded with his own money. Building alone for the first time in 15 years, Bhatt wrote the first check himself, roughly $10M, reasoning that at this stage of life he has less time than money. He describes the solo founder path as "a lot lonelier".
Robinhood product-market fit school. The hardest part of Robinhood was the consumer problem: banks and brokerages already existed, so two Stanford physics students had to find a need the big incumbents missed, working systematically from customer conversations into product decisions until millions used the product.
The orbital roadmap. The plan is a first satellite launch later in 2026 to demonstrate space-to-Earth power beaming, a GPU cluster operating in orbit in early 2027, and Cowboy Space own rocket flying by the end of 2028, the route to data centres in orbit by 2028.
"I still have that dog in me." Walking away from a multi-billion-dollar fintech to start a rocket company is, in Bhatt telling, the same hunger that built Robinhood, choosing the problem worth the climb, and the company is now hiring as it builds out its team.
Read more: Grit
