Rohit Jha, 36, is co-founder and CEO of Transcelestial.
Courtesy of Rohit Jha
Rohit Jha calls himself a “big nerd.”
He developed a deep love of computers, space, and ultimately science fiction in his early years.
Jha spent much of his childhood and adolescence coding games on a second-hand computer, looking at the stars through a telescope on the roof of his school, and reading the work of science fiction writer Isaac Asimov.
Today, the 36-year-old is co-founder and CEO of Transcelestial, a deep space and communications technology startup that aims to make the Web more accessible by developing and deploying a network of lasers between cell towers. , street-level poles and more, creating a fiber-like communications network.
Rohit Jha with members of the Transcelestial team.
Courtesy of Rohit Jha
To date, the company has raised around $24 million and is backed by names like Airbus Ventures, Wavemaker, and In-Q-Tel.
For the love of science fiction
Jha grew up in Jamshedpur, a small town that has since become a major industrial center in India.
While in high school, Jha was chosen to participate in the highly selective National Physics Olympiad program, which exposed him to more advanced concepts such as normal relativity, string theory, and quantum mechanics.
After high school, he moved to Singapore to attend Nanyang Technological University on a scholarship, where he studied electrical and electronic engineering. During that time, Jha says he worked on several major projects, including Singapore’s first space program as well as the country’s first indigenous space program. satellite.
It was during his high school and college days that Jha’s love for science fiction and space engineering accelerated.
Trip to fix Web
After graduating from university in 2011, Jha went into banking and worked in high-frequency trading at the Royal Bank of Canada. While working in banking, Jha discovered a problem.
“It was in banking where I finally realized why Web sucks,” he said. “As part of my role in e-commerce, what we are really looking for is optimizing latency between the world’s shopping centers. It is very important to know how fast you can go from New York to Chicago, from Chicago to London… and who has the fastest latencies. “.
It discovered that most of the world’s Web comes from a vast network of fiber optic cables strung along the ocean floor, carrying data between continents globally. These undersea cables can cost billions of dollars to install and often create bottlenecks and break as a result of ocean activity, he said.
Specifically, because the process of bringing the Web to people can be so expensive, the companies responsible for bringing connectivity into people’s hands are often motivated to “invest only in those cities where they have a sufficiently high probability of return.” of the investment,” he said. .
“So it all comes down to an economic game, and the incentives are very misaligned across the board,” Jha said. While “tier one” cities like San Francisco or New York get priority, less developed markets or remote villages may not get the same access.
“There will never be a future where the Web never exists unless we are eliminated… and data will always grow,” which means that the divide between the haves and the have-nots will also continue to widen, unless there is a sea. change in the way the Web is provided, he said.
Trusting in yourself
After several years on the job, Jha realized that banking was not for him.
“I was lucky, because I was a carefully selected team throughout the company and some of the best people I have ever worked with in my life, very impressive people, but… there were many times where I felt like a cog in the entire organization” , said.
Additionally, after growing up with a love of science fiction, he said he painted a kind of “utopia”: “a world where I was sure that when I grew up, we would have transportation to the Moon and Mars.”
“I realized that we continue to live in a world where we have been promised a future (that was) not fulfilled, and that was very frustrating, and I just didn’t want to continue living in that,” he said.
Jha finally decided to leave after realizing: “You have one life and (I’d) prefer to work on things where (I’m) sitting on the edge of the unknown.” So in 2015, he quit his job, took a year off to travel, and founded Transcelestial shortly after.
Big goals
In December 2016, Transcelestial was created after Jha met his co-founder Mohammad Danesh through a Singapore-based startup accelerator called Entrepreneur First.
“The first day I met Danesh and he was exactly the person I needed,” Jha said. “So we went to an (Indian restaurant) and had biryani early, we kept arguing, we had a second biryani meal, we kept arguing and finally it became clear that we wanted to start this company together.”
Transcelestial was founded in 2016 by co-founders Rohit Jha and Mohammad Danesh.
Courtesy of Rohit Jha
After much discussion, their goal was to create “the largest telecommunications company in the space possible for the next few decades,” Jha said. They decided the best way to do it would be with a laser.
“Lasers have the ability to carry data… for decades, that laser has been running through fiber optic cables, and that’s what powers our homes, offices, 5G data centers, everything,” he said. “What we’ve done is… take that laser from the inside of a fiber and run it wirelessly.”
“This means that you don’t get the speed of fiber, but rather the price savings and speed of deployment of wireless technologies. We can dramatically reduce the years and months, to days and weeks, when installing Web not just for a home, but even for a town. or a city,” Jha said.
Transcelestial’s Centauri provides wireless laser communications.
Courtesy of Rohit Jha
In 2024, the company deployed its lasers to the Coachella and Stagecoach music festivals through its shoebox-sized device called Centauri, providing enhanced Web access for T-Cell users attending the festivals, according to one company. statement.
Beyond its terrestrial telecommunications business, Transcelestial has its sights set on a bigger goal: space.
The company aims to develop a “constellation of small satellites located in low Earth orbit, which will enable (its) laser network to not only transmit across cities but also upward to connect continents globally,” according to a company statement.
“What we can do is effectively drop a fiber cable from orbit using lasers. So instead of the cable, it will be a laser that will come down to a city, and it will become the backbone of the entire city,” Jha said.
Ultimately, Jha and his team are looking to build the next frontier.
“As humanity expands, we need high-speed communication and connectivity in deep space,” he said. Transcelestial is working to “expand into deep space and build the infrastructure that is needed… for automation and perhaps even human settlement in the next two decades.”
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