The California-based company plans to transmit energy from satellites to ground stations.
Aetherflux announced it raised $50 million in a Series-A funding round to develop solar satellites that deliver energy to collector ground stations on Earth.
The company, started by billionaire Baiju Bhatt, a co-founder of the trading platform Robinhood, received funding from Index Ventures and Interlagos. Investors also include Breakthrough Energy Ventures, Andreessen Horowitz, NEA, Vlad Tenev, Dan Gallagher, Jared Leto, Laurent and François-Paul Journe, bringing total funding to $60 million.
Aetherflux said it plans to develop low-orbit satellites equipped with solar that wirelessly transmit energy to earth. The company plans to hold its first space demonstration in 2026.
“Our mission is to deliver energy to planet Earth,” said the company. “In the past few months, we’ve made progress toward making space solar power a reality: we were awarded our first government funding, grew the team and expanded our HQ, demonstrated power transmission in our lab, and capitalized the business to move even faster.”
The company in February gained approval for program funding from the U.S. Department of Defense’s Operational Energy Capability Improvement Fund to develop a proof of concept demonstration.
Aetherflux is drawing on engineers and researchers with backgrounds in NASA/JPL, SpaceX, Lockheed Martin, Anduril and the U.S. Navy.
Bhatt said the company seeks to build small, portable ground stations about 5 to 10 meters in diameter to bring electricity to remote locations. It said the project has applications in military operations and disaster relief, where ground wire transmission is not feasible.
Caltech demonstration
Beaming solar power from space may seem like science fiction, but it has been proven in the field. In 2023, Caltech launched the Space Solar Power Project (SSPD).
The SSPD deployed a constellation of modular spacecraft equipped with solar to collect sunlight, convert it to electricity and then wirelessly transmit the electricity over long distances wherever it is needed.
Wireless power transfer was demonstrated by Microwave Array for Power-transfer Low-orbit Experiment (MAPLE), developed at Caltech. MAPLE includes lightweight microwave power transmitters driven by custom electronic chips that were built using low-cost silicon technologies. It uses the array of transmitters to beam the energy to desired locations.
Caltech researchers estimate that solar from space could yield eight times more power than solar panels at any location on Earth’s surface.
