Rohit Jha, 36, is the co-founder and CEO of Transcelestial.
Courtesy of Rohit Jha
Rohit Jha calls himself a “big geek”.
In his early years, he developed a deep love for computers, space and eventually science fiction.
Jha spent much of his childhood and adolescence coding games on a used computer, looking at the stars through a telescope on the roof of his school, and reading the works of science fiction writer Isaac Asimov.
Today, the 36-year-old is the co-founder and CEO of Transcelestial, a deep space and communications technology startup that aims to make the Internet 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 later became a major industrial center of India.
While in high school, Jha was selected to participate in the highly selective National Physics Olympiad program, which exposed him to more advanced concepts such as general relativity, string theory, and quantum mechanics.
After high school, he moved to Singapore to attend Nanyang Technological University on 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 domestic indigenous program satellite.
During his high school and university days, Jhao’s love for science fiction and space engineering began to grow.
Internet Repair Trip
After graduating from university in 2011, Jha devoted himself to banking and worked in high-frequency trading at Royal Bank of Canada. While working in banking, Jha discovered a problem.
“In banking, I finally understood why the Internet was bad,” he said. “As part of my role in e-commerce, you’re really looking at optimizing latency between world trade centers. The big thing is how fast you can go from New York to Chicago, Chicago to London … and who has the fastest latencies.”
He discovered that most of the world’s Internet comes from a vast network of fiber-optic cables laid across the ocean floor that transmit data between continents around the world. Laying these undersea cables can cost billions of dollars, and they often develop bottlenecks and ruptures as a result of ocean activity, he said.
Namely, because the process of providing people with Internet 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 high enough chance of return on investment,” he said. .
“So it really comes down to an economic game, and the incentives are very misaligned,” Jha said. While “tier one” cities like San Francisco or New York are prioritized, markets that are less developed or remote villages may not get the same access.
“There will never be a future where the internet doesn’t exist unless we’re wiped out… and data will always grow,” meaning the gap between the haves and the have-nots will continue to widen unless there’s a sea change in the way of internet provision, he said.
Counting on myself
After working for a few years, Jha realized that banking was not for him.
“I was lucky because it was a carefully selected team across the company and some of the best people I’ve worked with in my life — very impressive people — but … there were many times when I felt like a cog in the whole organization,” he said. is.
Plus, having grown up loving science fiction, he said it depicted a kind of “utopia” — “a world where I was sure that by the time I grew up, we’d have transportation to the moon and Mars.”
“I realized that we continue to live in a world where we were promised a future [that was] didn’t deliver, and that was super frustrating and I just didn’t want to keep 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 launched Transcelestial not long after.
Big goals
In December 2016, Transcelestial was created after Jha met his co-founder Mohammad Danesh through a Singapore startup accelerator called Entrepreneur First.
“I met Danesh on the first day and he was just the person I needed,” Jha said. “So we went to [Indian restaurant]and we had an early biryani meal, we kept discussing, we had a second biryani meal, we kept talking, and then eventually 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 is to create “the largest telecom company in the universe that is possible in the next few decades,” Jha said. They decided that the best way to do this would be a laser.
“Lasers have the capacity to transmit data … for decades, that laser has been going through fiber optic cables, and that’s what’s powering our homes, offices, 5g data centers, everything,” he said. “What we’ve done is … taken that laser from the fiber and run it wirelessly.”
“That means it gets the speed of fiber, but the cost-effectiveness and speed of deployment of wireless technologies. We can dramatically reduce the years and months, to days and weeks of deploying internet not just for a home, but even for a village or a city,” Jha said.
Transcelestial’s Centauri provides wireless laser communication.
Courtesy of Rohit Jha
The company deployed its lasers at the Coachella and Stagecoach music festivals in 2024 via its shoebox-sized device called the Centauri, providing enhanced Internet access for T-Mobile customers attending the festivals, the company said statement.
Beyond its terrestrial telecommunications business, Transcelestial has a larger target – space.
The company aims to develop “a constellation of small satellites located in low earth orbit, enabling [its] laser network that not only broadcasts through the air over cities, but also upwards to connect continents globally,” the company said statement.
“What we can do is effectively drop a fiber-optic cable from orbit using a laser. So instead of a cable, it will be a laser that will come down into the city, and that will become the backbone for the entire city,” Jha said.
Jha and his team ultimately want to build the next frontier.
“As humanity expands, we need communication and fast connectivity in deep space,” he said. Transcelestial is working to “expand deep space and build the infrastructure needed … for automation, as well as possibly even human settlement in the next few decades.”
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