Cowboy Space, Darkhive detail their Series B rounds

Cowboy Space Corp.

This company pushing to make data centers in space a reality has collected $275 million in Series B capital to support satellite and rocket development efforts.

Cowboy was founded in 2024 by Baiju Bhatt, a co-founder of Robinhood Markets, to originally focus on building satellites that could deliver space-based solar energy to Earth. The company has gradually added launch rockets to its strategy with an emphasis on delivering artificial intelligence compute in-orbit.

Later this year, Cowboy plans to launch its first satellite with the goal of showing how power can be beamed from space to Earth. Cowboy is also working with NVIDIA to deploy a data center module that the companies see as enabling AI infrastructure operations in low-Earth orbit.

As Cowboy sees the world, terrestrial capacity is being strained by AI demand and new high-performance computing capabilities are needed to overcome that challenge. The company also designed its upper stage rocket and data center payload as a single vehicle.

Index Ventures led the Series B round, which values Cowboy Space at $2 billion. Science Applications International Corp., IVP and Blossom Capital are new investors entering the fold. Existing investors that participated include Breakthrough Energy Ventures, Construct Capital, Andreessen Horowitz, NEA, Interlagos and Baiju Bhatt.

Darkhive

This aerospace and defense technology company has fetched $30 million in Series B capital to accelerate production and delivery of its products, which include drones and software for use in military operations.

Darkhive was founded in 2021 by a group of Special Operations Command veterans to design software-defined hardware that can be quickly built and adopted by military operators.

In April, Darkhive was selected for a $49.7 million contract under the Defense Department’s Accelerate the Procurement and Fielding of Innovative Technologies program for quick fielding and scaling of new tech. This is the largest award in APFTI’s history, according to Darkhive.

Darkhive also touts a portfolio of programs with the Air Force and that service branch’s Research Laboratory, plus the Defense Innovation Unit and office of the Pentagon’s undersecretary for research and engineering.

RTX Corp.’s venture capital arm led the Series B round and also participated in Darkhive’s $21 million Series A round back in 2024, which was led by Ten Eleven Ventures. Autonomy and sensing is one of RTX Ventures’ six key focus areas for investing in young technology companies.

Draper Associates and Bison Capital have joined as new investors in Darkhive. Returning investors include Ten Eleven, Crosslink Capital, Alamo Angels, and Stellar Ventures.