Fintech founder Baiju Bhatt, best known for co-founding Robinhood, has set his sights on a new frontier: space. With his latest venture, Aetherflux, Bhatt plans to harness an endless supply of sunlight in orbit and beam it back to Earth — a bold attempt to make clean energy truly continuous.
His company, Aetherflux, has already raised $50 million to prove that the next generation of clean power might not come from rooftops or deserts — but from space. Backed by a team of aerospace engineers and climate scientists, Bhatt is betting that orbital sunlight could one day power life on Earth.
The idea is simple in theory, radical in practice: harvest sunlight in space, where it shines 24 hours a day, and transmit it to Earth using high-frequency microwave beams aimed at a ground receiver.
It's a concept that has captivated researchers for decades. Aetherflux believes its moment has arrived.
If all goes to plan, the company will launch its first demonstration satellite in 2026, capturing sunlight in orbit and beaming it wirelessly back to Earth. It sounds like science fiction — because, not long ago, it was.
Bhatt is part of a growing wave of tech founders applying startup logic to the energy transition. Once the domain of utilities, engineers, and policy veterans, the power sector is now drawing entrepreneurs from fintech, software, and even entertainment — people who see climate tech not just as infrastructure, but as imagination.
The Power Couple Leading Nuclear’s Reinvention
When Sam Altman, the OpenAI CEO and former Y Combinator head, announced he was investing in nuclear power, most assumed it was just another moonshot. Then came Oklo — a fission startup founded by Jacob DeWitte and Caroline Cochran, a husband-and-wife team of MIT-trained nuclear engineers on a mission to make clean, compact nuclear power accessible for communities around the world.
Oklo’s Aurora reactor, roughly the size of a two-story building, is designed to run for a decade without refueling, producing zero-carbon baseload power for communities, campuses, or data centers. Under DeWitte’s leadership as CEO — and, since April 2025, Chairman — the company has positioned itself at the forefront of the next nuclear renaissance. Cochran, Oklo’s COO, helped shape the company’s early design and regulatory strategy, combining technical rigor with entrepreneurial grit.
Altman, a significant investor and longtime board member, helped propel Oklo into the spotlight, even taking the company public through his SPAC in 2024 — one of the year’s defining climate-tech debuts. While he’s not a founder, his investment underscores a shared conviction: that abundant, clean energy is the foundation of the AI-powered future.
“We need power sources that are both clean and abundant,” Altman said. “The physics already works — the challenge is building faster, not smaller.”
With the DOE granting Oklo a first-of-its-kind license to construct a commercial microreactor in Idaho, DeWitte and Cochran are proving that the future of nuclear energy might not be large-scale plants — but microreactors built with startup speed and Silicon Valley ambition.
Katherine Boyle Is Betting on the Builders of the Next Energy Era
If founders like Bhatt, DeWitte, and Cochran represent the bold ideas, Katherine Boyle is the force ensuring they have the runway to scale. As a general partner at Andreessen Horowitz, Boyle leads the firm’s American Dynamism portfolio — a $1 billion bet on startups building what she calls “the physical infrastructure of progress.”
That includes frontier energy companies working on small modular reactors, carbon capture, and grid optimization, but Boyle’s thesis goes deeper than tech. She’s framing climate innovation as a matter of national resilience — a reimagining of how America builds, powers, and protects itself. “We used to celebrate people who built things,” Boyle wrote in a 2024 essay. “It’s time to make that cultural again.”
Her portfolio reads like a blueprint for that renaissance — Oklo among them, but also aerospace, advanced materials, and next-gen manufacturing startups. In Boyle’s view, climate tech isn’t a niche. It’s the next industrial revolution.
Gene Berdichevsky Is Turning Battery Innovation into Climate Impact
Before Gene Berdichevsky was reinventing the battery, he helped invent the one that powered Tesla’s first car. As the company’s seventh employee and lead battery engineer on the original Roadster, Berdichevsky understood early that electrification’s biggest bottleneck wasn’t design or demand — it was chemistry.
That insight led him to found Sila Nanotechnologies, a California-based materials startup developing next-generation lithium-ion batteries using silicon instead of graphite. The result: a lighter, more energy-dense cell capable of extending range in electric vehicles and shrinking the footprint of energy storage.
Sila’s technology — already deployed in consumer electronics and headed for Mercedes-Benz EVs — promises a step change in how we store and deliver power. The company opened its first large-scale manufacturing plant in Washington State in 2024, part of a wave of U.S. onshoring efforts under the Inflation Reduction Act.
“The key to transforming energy isn’t just building more — it’s building better,” Berdichevsky said. “Batteries are the foundation of the clean-energy economy.”
By reengineering what’s inside the battery rather than what’s around it, Berdichevsky is proving that the most profound climate breakthroughs can come from the smallest building blocks.
Together, these builders of the new energy economy represent a generational shift — where technology, ambition, and imagination converge to reshape how the world is powered. These seasoned builders with capital, credibility, and conviction are betting that the future of clean energy won’t be driven solely by policy or regulation — but by imagination powerful enough to redefine the limits of what’s possible.
