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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 his childhood and teenage years coding games on a second-hand computer, watching 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 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 cell towers, street-level masts and lasers. more, the creation of a fiber-like communication network.
Rohit Jha with members of Transcelestial.
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 city that has since become a major industrial hub in India.
While in high school, Jha was selected to participate in the highly selective National Physics Olympiad program, which introduced him to more advanced concepts such as general relativity, string theory, and quantum mechanics.
After finishing high school, he moved to Singapore on a scholarship to Nanyang Technological University, 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 projects. the satellite.
During his high school and college days, Jha’s love for science fiction and space engineering took off.
The journey to fixing the internet
After graduating from university in 2011, Jha joined banking and worked in high-frequency trading at Royal Bank of Canada. While working at the bank, Jha encountered a problem.
“It was at the bank that I finally realized why the Internet was bad,” he said. “As part of my role in e-commerce, you’re looking to optimize latency between the world’s 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, bringing data between continents globally. Those undersea cables can cost trillions of dollars to lay, and are often bottlenecked and broken by ocean activity, he said.
Notably, because the process of getting people the Internet can be so expensive, companies concerned with bringing connectivity into people’s hands tend to be motivated to “invest only in those cities with a relatively high ROI opportunity,” he said. .
“So it really boils down to an economic game, and the incentives are very misaligned,” Jha said. While “first-tier” cities like San Francisco or New York City are prioritized, less developed or remote towns may not have the same access.
“There will never be a future where the internet will never exist unless we wipe it out… and data will always grow,” which means the gap between the haves and the have-nots will also grow, unless there is a sea. Changing how the Internet is delivered, he said.
His own bank
After working for several years, Jha realized that banking was not for him.
“I was lucky because it was a hand-picked team from across the company, and some of the best people I’ve ever worked with in my life – very impressive people – but … I often felt like a cog in the whole organization,” he said.
In addition, he said that after growing up with a love of science fiction, he painted a kind of “utopia”: “I was convinced that by the time I grew up we would have transportation to the moon and Mars.”
“I realized that we continue to live in a world where we were promised a future (that) has not been given, and that was very frustrating, and I didn’t want to continue living in that,” he said.
Jha eventually decided to quit after realizing, “You have a life, and (I’d rather) 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 soon after started Transcelestial.
Big goals
In December 2016, Transcelestial was founded after Jha met its co-founder Mohammad Danesh through a startup accelerator in Singapore called Entrepreneur First.
“On the first day, I met Danesh and he was exactly the person I needed,” said Jha. “So we went to an (Indian restaurant) and had an early biryani meal, continued to discuss, had a second biryani meal, continued to discuss, and 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, they aimed to create “the largest telecommunications company in the space possible in the next few decades,” Jha said. They decided that the best way to do this would be by laser.
“Lasers have the ability to carry data … for decades, that laser has gone 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 inside a fiber and run it wirelessly.”
“This means that it achieves the speed of fiber, but at an economical price and the speed of deployment of wireless technologies. We can dramatically reduce years and months to days and weeks when setting up the Internet, not only for a home, but also for a village. or a village,” he said. by Jha
Transcelestial’s Centauri provides wireless laser communications.
Courtesy of Rohit Jha
In 2024, the company rolled out its lasers at the Coachella and Stagecoach music festivals through its shoebox-sized device called the Centauri, offering enhanced Internet access to T-Mobile users attending the festivals, according to a company statement. statement.
Beyond the terrestrial telecommunications business, Transcelestial has set its sights on a larger goal: space.
The company wants to “develop a constellation of small satellites in low earth orbit, allowing (its) laser networks to extend across cities and connect continents around the world,” according to a company statement. statement.
“What we can do is throw a fiber cable from orbit using lasers. So instead of the cable, it’s going to be a laser that goes down into a city, and that becomes the backbone of the whole city,” Jha said.
Jha and his team are ultimately looking to build the next frontier.
“As humanity expands, we need communication and high-speed connectivity in deep space,” he said. Transcelestial is working to “expand into deep space and build the necessary infrastructure … for automation and possibly even human settlement in the coming decades.”
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