Space is a $500 billion industry that still settles deals on faxes, wire transfers, and diplomatic phone calls. That is the argument Tejpaul Bhatia, founder and CEO of Nebex, took to Bloomberg Businessweek Daily. It’s also the pitch that recently attracted a $30 million seed round led by GV (formerly Google Ventures) and a banking relationship with JPMorgan Chase (NYSE: JPM | JPM Price Prediction).
Bhatia’s claim is blunt: space is the only major sector left on Earth without functioning capital markets plumbing. His fix is to build one.
Why an Ex-Axiom CEO Is Building an Exchange
Bhatia brings deep aerospace credentials to this fintech play. He previously ran Axiom Space, where he sent 16 astronauts to space across 12 sovereign nations. According to Nebex’s launch materials, he has personally structured more than $1 billion in commercial space deals involving governments, NASA, and SpaceX. He is joined by Anand Subramanian, a repeat exchange founder (ContextWeb, NimbleTV), and Manlio Di Stefano, former Vice Minister of Foreign Affairs of Italy.
The Nebex thesis is that every space transaction today is “bilateral and sequential,” with no parallel processing. A satellite operator in the UAE that wants to buy launch capacity from a U.S. provider, insure it through a European underwriter, and settle in dollars has to negotiate every leg one at a time. Bhatia traces the dysfunction back to the Cold War: the International Space Station was deliberately structured so that “no money would exchange hands” between partner nations, a design meant to keep politics out that ended up freezing the industry into a sovereign-to-sovereign barter system.
The $137 Billion Wedge
The addressable market Bhatia keeps citing is the annual flow of government space budgets.
He puts 2026 government-appropriated space spending at $137.4 billion, all publicly traceable through RFPs and tenders. That figure lines up with what is visible in U.S. appropriations alone. The FY2026 federal budget allocates $3.394 billion for Space Force procurement and $5.888 billion for Space Force operations and maintenance, with mandatory research, development, test, and evaluation authority of $13.548 billion layered on top. Layer in NASA, allied budgets, and sovereign programs from India, the UAE, Japan, and Saudi Arabia, and the pool of contract dollars looking for infrastructure is enormous.
The problem is that none of it moves like modern capital. A defense prime can wait 18 months to be paid on a milestone. A startup building a lunar lander cannot.
The Wells Fargo Analogy
Bhatia’s historical framing is deliberate. He argues that earlier industries scaled when invisible market infrastructure caught up with physical infrastructure: Wells Fargo and American Express grew by moving and securing valuables across the American frontier, while innovations like the standardized shipping container transformed global trade into a more predictable, financeable system.
Nebex wants to build that missing market infrastructure layer for space — the financial and commercial rails connecting buyers, suppliers, and capital in an industry that still lacks a standardized way to scale.
GV general partner Erik Nordlander framed the bet this way in the funding announcement: “Nebex is building the financial backbone that will finally unlock the entire commercial space economy.”
What Investors Should Watch
The timing matters. Commercial launch supply is finally scaling, led by SpaceX, whose recent public listing has forced every allocator to build a space view. Our coverage of the SpaceX IPO aftermath details how capital is now searching for the next layer of the stack, and financial infrastructure is one of the few remaining greenfield categories.
Three questions will decide whether Nebex becomes the CME (Chicago Mercantile Exchange) of orbit or a well-funded science project.
First, can it get sovereign buyers, not just U.S. startups, to route transactions through a neutral private exchange? Second, will JPMorgan expand from banking partner to clearing partner? Third, will regulators treat cross-border space payments like commodities, securities, or something new entirely? Any investor with exposure to defense primes, satellite operators, or launch providers should keep an eye on the answers.
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