Tej Bhatia and I go back to 1999, when we were fresh out of college, working at the same dot-com company in New York. We’ve stayed close ever since, through his first angel investment in a space company, his run as CEO of that same company, and now his new venture, Nebex, which has been backed by the likes of Google Ventures, Eniac, and Better Tomorrow Ventures. But his fascination with space goes back even further than any of that. I sat down with him to get the story behind it all.
“My fascination with space started when I was young, like three years old. It was more than a fascination, it was an obsession. But daydreams, not something real.”
In this interview, Tej breaks down why Nebex is built as an exchange and not a marketplace, walks through a $138 billion market that still runs largely on barter, and explains why he brought his executive coach on as a co-founder before he brought on a single investor. He also gets into the exact moment, on his fourth mission as Axiom’s CEO, when he realized he was playing with house money.
The Angel Check That Became a Career
Tej and I met through Pitch and Run, a running group that started in New York and has since gone nationwide. During the pandemic, when the group got tight-knit from socially distanced runs, Tej told me he was about to make his first angel investment ever, in a space company called Axiom Space.
He didn’t have much of a framework for it. As he put it:
“I don’t really have a thesis besides I think space is cool.”
Axiom called him post-COVID for advice on go-to-market and revenue. That advisory role turned into something bigger.
“What started as a small angel investment in a company turned out to be a full-time job.”
Tej quit his job at Google to become Axiom’s Chief Revenue Officer, working deals ranging from $50 million to $150 million with sovereign governments, deals that operated at the level of presidents, prime ministers, and ministers of agencies he didn’t know existed before he took the job. He describes himself as unconventional for the role, a founder type dropped into a sector he knew nothing about.
“It turns out I’m a pretty good CRO when it comes to zero to one deals that have never happened before.”
That approach got him promoted to CEO of Axiom, a multi-billion-dollar space company, where he helped bring in a billion dollars in revenue in three years, a pace the space industry had rarely seen outside of SpaceX and Starlink. He left Axiom last October and started what would become Nebex soon after.
Why He Calls It an Exchange, Not a Marketplace
I asked Tej to walk me through what Nebex actually does, and he stopped me on the word “marketplace.”
“We’ve honed in on the word ‘exchange’ as opposed to ‘marketplace.'”
Nebex is built around three parties in every transaction:
- a buyer
- a seller
- capital market(s)
It makes money on all three sides of a deal. Nearly every transaction in the space industry crosses national borders, whether that’s a European government buying commercial launch capacity or a prime contractor sourcing a subcontractor overseas. That creates friction most other industries solved long ago: import-export regulations, tariffs, industrial return requirements, and geopolitics.
Historically, space agencies dealt with that friction by bartering instead of using money directly.
“A barter system only works if one side needs what the other side has and vice versa at exactly the same time. That has never existed in human history, literally never.”
Nebex positions itself as a neutral third party that can see every transaction happening across the market at once, not just one bilateral deal at a time, and structure what Tej calls “match book transactions,” borrowing a page from merchant banking to make sure the timing of money works even when a direct trade doesn’t. The platform is heavily AI-driven, and GV is Nebex’s primary investor alongside a handful of AI-focused funds. The company raised an unusually large seed round for either space or fintech, and Tej said that size was intentional given what the exchange needs to do from day one.
A $138 Billion Market Stuck in a Time Warp
Human spaceflight is the part of the business Tej is best known for, and it’s a small fraction of the actual space market.
“Human spaceflight … is the sexiest part. It’s the most critiqued part because it’s the most visible, but it’s less than a percent of the entire market.”
Governments spend $138 billion a year on space overall, and most of that has nothing to do with astronauts. Tej argues the financial infrastructure around that spending hasn’t caught up to how business gets done anywhere else.
“Every single one of these buildings cost way more than what a space station would cost to build … You’re telling me we can’t put up space stations?”
He used SpaceX as the clearest example. If a European country needs to buy launch capacity, policy in some cases prevents money from simply crossing the Atlantic. Historically, agencies like the European Space Agency and NASA handled that through value-in-kind barter arrangements rather than direct payment. A commercial company doesn’t have that option. Nebex’s pitch is that it can step in as the trusted counterparty that lets a real transaction happen instead of a barter workaround.
Coaching, Built Into the Company From Day Zero
Nebex’s team page lists a colleague named Wilson Kriegel with the title Behavioral Organization. Next to a roster of space and finance executives, it looks out of place. That’s until you learn that Wilson is Tej’s executive coach.
“Wilson is our coach, and we have embedded coaching into the company from day zero.”
Tej and Wilson met decades ago, back when Tej was working at ESPN around 2002. They lost touch and reconnected years later through Pitch and Run, eventually realizing they’d worked together long before. About a year before Nebex existed, while Tej was CRO at Axiom, he asked Wilson to become his executive coach, not for startup advice specifically, but because he wanted the kind of coaching an athlete gets, support with recovery and rest, not just results.
“A professional athlete would have a coach. Why wouldn’t a professional business person have one?”
His co-founder, Anand Subramanian, built Context Web in the late 90s, the first ad exchange alongside DoubleClick, and later built Nimble TV. He’s also a trained aerospace engineer, which makes him a natural fit for Nebex twice over. Tej and Anand made a deliberate choice to bring Wilson on as a co-founder before they signed a term sheet or brought on outside investment, precisely because they’d both seen how fast co-founder relationships can fracture.
“Even if we’re aligned 99% of the time, that 1% of misalignment can go like this very quickly.”
Tej has written more about how he thinks about working style, psychological safety, and leadership on his own Medium page, in a post he calls a user guide to working with him. It predates Nebex, but it’s a good window into the kind of self-awareness that led him to build coaching into the company from the start rather than bolt it on later.
Playing With House Money
“Anything I do from this point forward in the game of purpose is going to be playing with house money.”
Tej told me about a specific moment that changed how he thinks about everything he’s built. It happened after Axiom’s fourth crewed mission, the first three of which he’d worked as CRO before becoming CEO.
That mission sent India’s first astronaut to the International Space Station, under Tej’s watch as CEO. He didn’t fully register the significance of it, being the first person of Indian descent to lead a space company while sending up India’s first astronaut, until the crew was safely back on the ground.
“This is 45 years in the making. This is that moment when I was three years old and I recognized my calling.”
That’s the moment that put him in what he calls house money territory, the sense that everything from here is bonus.
The full conversation covers more ground, including his first three startups and why none of them had a coach in the room, what our mutual friend Jerry Colonna has to do with all of this, and the answer he gave me when I asked what he wants to tell his grandkids about Nebex someday. Watch it above.
