Baiju Bhatt, the co-founder of Robinhood, has secured $275 million in Series B funding for Cowboy Space Corporation, pushing the company's valuation to $2 billion. The round was led by Index Ventures, with participation from Breakthrough Energy Ventures, Construct Capital, IVP, and SAIC. This latest funding comes on top of the $80 million the company had previously raised from investors including Andreessen Horowitz and New Enterprise Associates. The capital will fund what Bhatt describes as the company's own rocket development program, with the first launch targeted before the end of 2028. The company, originally launched in 2024 under the name Aetherflux, initially focused on collecting solar energy in space and beaming it down to Earth. The concept of space-based power generation evolved into a vision for orbital data centers that would use that electricity directly in orbit. However, Bhatt discovered a critical bottleneck: there simply aren't enough rockets available to launch such a venture at scale. After speaking with multiple launch providers, he couldn't find sufficient capacity to build a viable orbital data center business with competitive economics. The rocket shortage is a significant challenge across the space data center industry. Most competitors are counting on SpaceX's Starship to solve this problem, with the vehicle's 12th test flight expected as soon as this weekend. But even when Starship becomes operational, experts anticipate years before it becomes commercially available, given SpaceX's substantial internal satellite commitments. Blue Origin's New Glenn rocket, another potential workhorse, failed to deliver a satellite during its third launch in April, further constraining options. This bottleneck has forced other space data center projects to adopt longer timelines. Google's Suncatcher initiative is targeting the mid-2030s for deployment. Starcloud is taking a more modest approach, focusing initially on edge processing tasks for space-based sensors rather than full-scale data center operations. Cowboy Space's bet on building its own rockets represents a direct attempt to circumvent these constraints entirely.