Rohit Jha, a former high-frequency trader, founded Transcelestial to address the limitations of undersea internet cables and create a more accessible and reliable global network.
Jha spent much of his childhood and adolescence coding games, star-gazing through a telescope on his school's rooftop, and reading 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.
To date, the company has raised about $24 million, and is backed by names like Airbus Ventures, Wavemaker, and In-Q-Tel. While in high school, Jha was chosen to take part in the highly selective National Physics Olympiad program, which exposed him to more advanced concepts like general relativity, string theory, and quantum mechanics. After high school, he moved to Singapore to attend the 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 satellite. It was throughout his high school and university days that Jha's love for science fiction and space engineering kicked into high gear. 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 that I finally realized why the internet sucked,' he said. 'As part of my role in electronic trading, you're really looking at optimizing latency between world's trading centers. It's a big thing 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 that are laid across the ocean floor, which bring data between continents globally. These undersea cables can cost billions of dollars to lay, and often create bottlenecks and break as a result of ocean activity, he said. Notably, because the process of getting internet to people can be so costly, the companies responsible for bringing connectivity to the hands of the people are often motivated to 'only invest in those cities where they have a high enough chance of ROI,' he said. 'So it really boils down to an economics game, and the incentives are heavily misaligned across the board,' Jha said. While 'tier one' cities like San Francisco or New York City get priority, markets that are less developed or remote villages may not get the same access. 'There's never going to be a future where the internet never exists unless we are wiped out ... and data will always grow,' which means that the divide between the haves and have nots will also continue to widen, unless there is a sea change in how the internet is provided, he said. 'I was lucky, because it was the hand-picked team in the entire company, and some of the best people I've ever worked with in my life — very impressive people — but ... there were many times that I felt like a cog in the whole organization,' he said. In addition, after growing up with a love for sci-fi, he said it painted a 'utopia' of sorts — 'a world where I was sure that by the time I grew up, we would have transportation to moon and Mars.' 'I realized that we are continuing to live in a world where we have been promised a future not delivered, and that was just super frustrating, and I just didn't want to continue living in that,' he said. Jha finally decided to leave after coming to a realization: 'You have one life, and rather work on things where sitting at the edge of the unknown.' So in 2015, he quit his job, took a year off to travel, and started Transcelestial shortly after. In December 2016, Transcelestial was created after Jha met his co-founder Mohammad Danesh through a Singapore-based startup accelerator called Entrepreneur First. 'On day one, I met Danesh and he was exactly the person I needed,' Jha said. 'So we went to an , and we had an early biryani meal, we kept discussing, we had a second biryani meal, kept discussing, and then eventually it was clear that we wanted to start this company together.' Transcelestial was founded in 2016 by co-founders Rohit Jha and Mohammad Danesh. After much discussion, they aimed to create 'the biggest telecom company in space that's possible for the next few decades,' Jha said. They decided that the best way to do so would be through lasers. 'Lasers have the capacity 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
LASER COMMUNICATIONS INTERNET ACCESS UNDERSEA CABLES SPACE ENGINEERING STARTUP
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