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Rohit Jha, 36, is the co-founder and CEO of Transcelestial.
Courtesy of Rohit Jha
Rohit Jha calls himself a “huge nerd”.
He developed a deep love for computers, space and ultimately science fiction in his early years.
Jha spent most of his childhood and adolescence coding games on a second-hand computer, looking at stars through a telescope on the roof of his school and reading the work of science 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 laser network between cell towers, i more road poles, creating a fiber communications network.
Rohit Jha with members of the Transcelestial team.
Courtesy of Rohit Jha
To date, the company has raised approximately $24 million, and is backed by names such as Airbus Ventures, Wavemaker and In-Q-Tel.
For the love of sci-fi
Jha grew up in Jamshedpur, a small town that has since become a major industrial center in 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 indigenous one. satellite.
It was during his high school and college days that Jha’s love for science fiction and space engineering blossomed.
Travel to fix the internet
After graduating from university in 2011, Jha went into banking and worked in high-frequency trading at the Royal Bank of Canada. While working at the bank, Jha discovered a problem.
“It was in the banks that I finally understood why the internet sucked,” he said. “As part of my role in e-commerce, you’re really trying to optimize the latency between the world’s trading centers. It’s a big thing how fast you can go from New York to Chicago, Chicago to London… and which one has the fastest latencies.”
He discovered that most of the world’s internet comes from a vast network of fiber optic cables that are laid at the bottom of the ocean, carrying data between continents around the world. These submarine cables can cost billions of dollars to lay, and often create bottlenecks and break due to ocean activity, he said.
In particular, because the process of getting the Internet to people can be so expensive, the companies responsible for bringing connectivity to people’s hands are often motivated to “invest only in those cities where they have a high enough probability of ROI”, he said. .
“So it really comes down to a game of economics, and the incentives are very misaligned across the board,” Jha said. While “tier one” cities like San Francisco or New York City have priority, markets that are less developed or remote countries may not have the same access.
“There will never be a future where the Internet will never exist, unless we remove it … and the data will continue to grow,” which means that the divide between the haves and the have-nots will continue to widen, unless there is a sea. change in how the internet is provided, he said.
Banking on himself
Several years into the job, Jha realized that banking was not for him.
“I was lucky, because it was the hand-picked team in the whole company, and some of the best people I’ve ever worked with in my life – very impressive people – but … there are many times when I feel like a cog throughout the organization,” he said.
Also, having grown up with a love of sci-fi, he said he painted a “utopia” of sorts – “a world where I was sure that when I grew up, we had transportation to the moon and Mars.”
“I understand that we continue to live in a world where we have been promised a future [that was] not delivered, and it was just super frustrating, and I didn’t want to keep living in it,” he said.
Jha finally decided to leave after coming to a realization: “You have one life, and [I’d] rather work on things where [I’m] I’m witnessing the brink of the unknown.” So in 2015, he quit his job, took a year off to travel, and started Transcelestial soon after.
Big goals
In December 2016, Transcelestial was created after Jha met its co-founder Mohammad Danesh through a Singapore-based startup accelerator called Entrepreneur First.
“On the first day, I met Danesh and he was exactly the person I needed,” Jha said. “So let’s go to one [Indian restaurant]and we had a biryani meal first, we continued to discuss, we had a second biryani meal, we continued to discuss, and then in the end it was 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, they aim to create “the largest telecommunications company in the space that is possible for the next few decades,” Jha said. They decided that the best way to do so would be through lasers.
“Lasers have the ability to carry data … for decades, that laser has been through fiber optic cables, and that’s what powers our homes, offices, 5g data centers, everything,” he said. “What we’ve done is we’ve … taken that laser from inside a fiber and run it wirelessly.”
“This means that you get the speed of fiber, but the economy of the price and the speed of implementation of wireless technologies. We can dramatically reduce years and months, to days and weeks when creating Internet for not only a home, but also a village. or a city,” said Jha.
Transcelestial Centauri provides wireless laser communications.
Courtesy of Rohit Jha
In 2024, the company deployed its lasers at the Coachella and Stagecoach music festivals through its shoebox-sized device called the Centauri, which provides enhanced Internet access for T-Mobile users who they attended the festivals, according to a company. statement.
Beyond its terrestrial telecommunications business, Transcelestial has its sights set on a larger goal – space.
The company aims to develop a “constellation of small satellites positioned in low Earth orbit, which allows [its] The laser network is not only to transmit in the cities, but also to connect the continents in the world,” according to a company statement.
“What we can do is effectively drop a fiber cable from orbit with lasers. So instead of the cable, it will be a laser that goes down into a city, and that will become the backbone for the whole city,” said Jha.
Jha and his team are ultimately looking to build the next frontier.
“As humanity expands, we need high-speed communication and connectivity in deep space,” he said. Transcelestial is working on “expanding into deep space and building the infrastructure that is necessary … for automation and perhaps even human settlement in the next two decades.”
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