"Without telling the board, we took some capital out. Most of our team is ex-space, so we gave them extra beer and pizza and said, 'Look, you have this much money. Let's get to space, and then if we are successful, everyone will be happy and no one will say anything.' Taking an insane risk mentality is absolutely critical to success." - Rohit Jha, Co-founder and CEO of Transcelestial
"The bottleneck is not the connectivity at the city level, but the connectivity between data centers sitting in different countries or continents. What we are now building is essentially an undersea cable replacement. We are putting 40 satellites around the equator, forming a ring that provides connectivity of a terabyte per second, moving internet and cloud capabilities directly to orbit." - Rohit Jha, Co-founder and CEO of Transcelestial
"You have had a space company like Starlink launch and become ten times bigger than the biggest telco in the world. Telcos, like power grids, will remain nationalistic as long as nations exist because they route sensitive information tied to national security. However, they are now forced to adopt the space domain organically to provide better latency and lower costs." - Rohit Jha, Co-founder and CEO of Transcelestial
Rohit Jha, Co-founder and CEO of Transcelestial, joins Jeremy Au to discuss the future of global connectivity through laser communications. They unpack how Transcelestial is building an orbital ring of satellites to effectively replace traditional undersea cables and move cloud capabilities directly into space.
Rohit breaks down the strategic difference between Transcelestial's high-bandwidth laser network and radio-frequency solutions like SpaceX’s Starlink, explaining why partnering with national telcos is more sustainable than competing against them. Finally, Rohit shares a wild personal story about fending off muggers in Germany, drawing parallels to the brave, risk-taking mentality that led his team to secretly launch their space division.
00:00 - Sneaking capital to launch a space division
01:13 - Introduction to Transcelestial and laser internet
03:39 - From investment banking to understanding global networks
05:39 - Iterating product-market fit with terrestrial telcos
07:35 - How laser technology differs from SpaceX and Starlink
10:54 - Building an orbital ring to replace undersea cables
14:54 - The future of physical telcos in the age of space internet
19:14 - Why telcos prefer partnering over competing with space giants
26:04 - A personal story of bravery: Fighting muggers in Germany
28:46 - Why taking calculated risks is critical for multi-planetary goals
Keywords: Space Tech, Laser Communications, Satellite Internet, Telecommunications, Undersea Cable Replacement, SpaceX Starlink Alternative, Southeast Asia Deep Tech* *
Full Transcript
*
Jeremy Au: Hello, Rohit, how are you? Good to have you finally on the show.
Rohit Jha: Hey, Jeremy. It's great. I'm glad to come.
Jeremy Au: Rohit, exciting to see Transcelestial and the evolution over time. I want to catch up a little bit on that and make sure we cover all of those points. For those who don't know you yet, could you introduce yourself?
Rohit Jha: I am one of the co-founders and the CEO of Transcelestial. We have invented this technology which uses lasers to transmit the internet worldwide today. We are the world's largest manufacturer of this technology. Right now, the company is working towards building an orbital ring in lower to orbit, which basically surpasses the undersea cable and is used for both global communications and orbital data centers effectively.
Jeremy Au: How did you even decide to build and launch Transcelestial?
Rohit Jha: We were part of the Entrepreneur First cohort, which is an accelerator. They bring individuals together who can build something at the intersection of their interests or mainly their expertise. I was looking at the Breakthrough Initiative and thinking about how, as humanity scales amongst the stars, what are the things that are going to be important for it. When you think deeply about such a problem, what it really comes down to is three major pillars that any civilization is based on. One is transportation, going from point A to point B. The second is energy. Solar energy in and around Earth's orbit starts to get very weak. So, we need to find higher-density energy creation, storage, and transportation in space. That's still an unsolved problem. And the third is communications. Every single time throughout human history, when we have gone from pigeons to fire, to using Morse code, to wireless, to undersea cables, our entire GDP and our capability as a civilization has gone up. That became really interesting, and the inspiration came from looking up at the night sky and seeing starlight travel millions of light years to reach us. If you are able to put zeros and ones and encode that as photons or light, then we should be able to move data across stellar distances, which sounds like the starting point for humanity to expand in deep space and still be connected. When we looked around, we didn't see any company actually building this technology. That's the genesis of Transcelestial. We said, look, we will not only create this technology, but we have to work at making this at scale so we can actually build out the telecommunications network in deep space that's needed to do that.
Jeremy Au: What's interesting is your personal transition. It's a big jump from Nanyang Technological University in Singapore with your electrical and electronic engineering degree. One path is joining aerospace or DBS bank as an engineer. How did you make that personal set of decisions from how you graduated to being a founder?
Rohit Jha: As all engineers do after university, I joined investment banking. It was quite easy just looking at all the offers on the table. I was like, that pays the most, so I'll just go for that. But it was a super fun job. I worked with RBS, and I was involved in foreign exchange, looking at pricing and hedging for low-latency trading. One thing it really did was expose me for the first time to how the internet really works. Everyone was using it at that point, but no one really understands it. Nine out of ten people on the road don't know; they think it's beamed from satellites or magically comes from someplace. You start to understand that the internet is really a network of networks. There are these giant undersea cables which bring data between continents. Then on a national level, at a city level, telcos and governments have to spend so much time and money to put fiber optics under the ground, dig, and deploy trenches. It is not an easy task. Globally, Singapore is very unique, and maybe Japan to some extent, where a lot of this investment has been done very early on. But it required a tremendous amount of investment on a small scale. You cannot replicate that in large countries like the US or India. That's where I started to understand that whatever technology we are thinking about for space and what's needed for humanity in space could also help improve connectivity for the rest of the people in larger countries, where they're still struggling with good quality internet at cheap prices and low latency to the cloud.
Jeremy Au: What's interesting is that you understood this network piece and you made a set of decisions about wanting to build satellite internet. At that point, there was SpaceX, Starlink, and some level of vision for the internet in space. What was your product-market fit iteration to get to where you are today?
Rohit Jha: We decided to take our time to build the technology, build a team, and build the technology at scale—applying large-scale production—and then work out the supply chain needed behind the scenes. We said, if this is a technology of the future, it needs to solve today's problems. For the first few years, we focused on working with telcos in every country to take that technology and say, "Look, you guys are deploying fiber optics across your 5G cell towers. Let us provide you connectivity using laser communications." Instead of spending months and years trying to dig fiber and spending billions of dollars, you spend a fraction of the time and a fraction of the cost to set that up. Fast forward to today, NTT Group recently invested in us last year for our Japan entry. Now, NTT also sells our technology worldwide across 200-plus countries. Similarly, we are everywhere in Taiwan, Japan, Southeast Asia, Indonesia, Malaysia, and the Philippines. We work with 100% of all the telcos. Globe Telecom and Telkomsel are some of our forward-looking, most aggressively deploying telcos, along with Reliance and BSNL in India. In the US, some of our flagship customers have been T-Mobile, AT\&T, and Verizon. We've been working on a host of use cases for them. This technology is scaling tremendously now. We are building 30 terminals a week. We just went from 10 terminals to 30 terminals in January, and we are doubling that capacity again in the next couple of months. With a host of partners and telcos that we work with worldwide, this is starting to make a real impact on connectivity at a city level in various countries today.
Jeremy Au: Can we talk about the differentiation between your approach with laser high bandwidth versus SpaceX? They also have a connectivity mission, but could you talk about the differences in the technology, but also the use case? Is it competitive? Is it synergistic? How do you see it?
Rohit Jha: With SpaceX, the overlap actually comes in our space division. We started looking at our space portfolio roughly a year and a half ago because we thought it was time to go back to the original vision as we were starting to provide value on the ground. Space has been quite interesting. We secretly tested space-to-ground communications, and now we are starting to work with various satellite providers. Anyone who is not SpaceX is signing us up. In the last three months, we have signed up close to six satellite manufacturers, scaling to about a satellite manufacturer a month. Basically, what's happening with SpaceX, Amazon, and the rest of the world—anyone building communication networks in space—is they're building a concept I call "Wi-Fi from space." What that means is you basically have this giant Wi-Fi router in space. It is extremely powerful, much more so than your local home router, and it's beaming a radio signal that you use some kind of hardware on the ground to receive. Anyone who has Wi-Fi at home knows that if you walk into the next room, your speed reduces, or sometimes you lose the signal. These are the same problems SpaceX and everyone else has. Because they're so far away, they are significantly lower in speeds. While they are very good for extremely rural people, climbers, or ships out in the middle of the sea, they are really only useful for the less than 1% of the world who are literally on the edge. But for the rest of the bulk, the 99% of the world, things are changing with the advancement of AI. I don't know if you saw Google's earnings call yesterday, but they basically said that their search traffic has doubled or more than doubled just because of AI-based search. In the last five years, internet traffic has tripled or quadrupled because of that. That means our infrastructure supporting the 99% is already old. That's where our space network comes in. We realized the bottleneck is not the connectivity at the city level, but the connectivity between data centers sitting in different countries or continents, and connecting those to population groups. How can that AI capability or service be brought to the user? What we are building now is basically an undersea cable replacement. We are putting 40 satellites around the equator. We call it "The Ring." The Ring will provide connectivity of a terabyte per second. A terabyte per second is roughly the internet backbone for all of Singapore, and each of our satellites can do that. Each of our satellites is also being specced to 20 to 30-kilowatt data center capacity, so they can run AI capabilities and full cloud capabilities in orbit using large learning models. All of that basically moves the internet and cloud capability to orbit. Unlike SpaceX and everyone else, this is using light or lasers, which is around a thousand to a million times faster than Starlink.
Jeremy Au: When we met years ago, the initial concept was really about ground-to-space. What I'm seeing now is that you have this ground-to-ground laser approach first, and now you're adding the satellite component, but much more specified on the routes or nodes that you actually need to cover. That is quite interesting to see.
Rohit Jha: If you look at SpaceX, Amazon, and all the companies building LEO constellations, they're talking about thousands of satellites, which requires a huge amount of CapEx and launches over the next few years, plus a lot of spectrum licensing. They're fighting with different governments and telcos on that because telcos use the same 5G spectrum for their own networks. That's where we come in. We are now working with all our telco and government customers to provide this technology, which offers non-jammable communication. Whether you have a satellite in orbit taking photos or handling communications, a drone flying at a high altitude, a ship out at sea, or a base somewhere, our orbital ring basically provides an internet backbone that is the same as any data center or country can get. Not only that, it provides cloud capabilities directly in space. This turns every satellite that is not Starlink or SpaceX into an IoT gateway. Every single satellite that goes up into space is going to be forever connected to the internet. That is an extremely powerful shift from what we have seen so far. That's why we are having a record number of satellite companies approach us saying, "Look, we just want a laser terminal from you so that when our satellites go up in the next couple of months, they are always connected to the internet 24/7." That suddenly expands the amount of things they can do. The internet is a network of networks, so we still have to use our optical ground stations to feed the internet up into orbit. That's where we are starting to build out a bunch of these optical ground stations. Today, our first two are in Singapore and Barcelona. We are actually beaming lasers into orbit to our test satellites to perfect connectivity between space and ground. By the end of this year, we are looking at putting a half dozen of these around the world. In the next two years, we are looking at two dozen cities going live with our optical ground stations. We are just starting to ramp up and get more cities connected.
Jeremy Au: That makes a lot of sense. It seems like you're thinking much more of a partnership approach with the satellites. They seem to be interfacing with your ground terminals, and you're focusing on the ground side while partnering with them on the space side. Is that a fair assessment?
Rohit Jha: For our ring, those satellites are owned and run by Transcelestial. That whole network is actually owned by us. For the satellites themselves, we are working with other partners, but the entire network will be owned by us. We are going to be the telco. We have one test satellite which went up for testing in December, and we have three more going up this October for much larger capability testing. Starting next year, we will deploy our dedicated satellites in orbit to build the ring out. But yes, we are working with third-party satellite owners to give them internet capability. Think of it like we are selling them a SIM card, and they can connect to our network in space.
Jeremy Au: The tricky part about building a network is that at zero, you are worthless. At one, close to worthless. At ten, you're something. But at 100 or 1,000, that's where the order of magnitude goes up, right?
Rohit Jha: The long-term value for the network is defined by how many subscribers and concurrent connections you have. That's why telcos, while spending money on building out 5G towers, also heavily discount their 5G handsets. They just want more subscribers so the day they turn on the network, they can start monetizing it. That's the approach. When we look at the Philippines and Indonesia, you have 10,000 to 15,000 islands. When we talk to our telco customers, they are currently building undersea cables to every island, which is very expensive. With a network like this going up, it will have 100% coverage in all of Southeast Asia in the first batch. That means every single island can have internet as fast as Singapore going forward. That is very powerful, and it comes at a fraction of the cost that Starlink or anyone else is charging.
Jeremy Au: What's the future of physical-based ground telcos? I was reading an article, and their argument was that with SpaceX giving you a global SIM card at equivalent speeds for global connectivity with no roaming charges, the traditional country-based telco would go away. I read that and thought it was an argument, but I'm curious from your perspective. What do you think is the role of all the current telcos in the world today?
Rohit Jha: We work very closely with the telcos, and I would say every single telco right now is cautiously optimistic. In the time span that they have been slowly rolling out fiber networks and acquiring customers, you've had a space company like Starlink launch and become 10 times bigger than the biggest telco in the world. Actually, maybe 70 times bigger if they hit the $7 trillion valuation. Literally, a company that started selling space services and serves less than 1% of the global market can actually acquire most of the telcos in the world combined. Obviously, all the telco CEOs are wondering what they should do. Telecommunications is a birthright for citizens now. You cannot imagine a life without being connected to the internet in any country. Telcos, like power grids, will remain nationalistic until the end of time as long as nations exist. They route sensitive information and are tied very heavily to national security. The national identity for telcos will not change. However, they are forced to understand and adopt the space domain. It's not just something they can use for five people on the fringes; they really need an organic strategy. They need to figure out how space can provide better latency and lower cost per bit, not only at the edge but also at the core. Another thing you might be seeing in the news is that almost every telco says they're not a telco; they are a TechCo right now. That terminology shift comes from the fact that just selling data packages is not enough. Almost every telco in Southeast Asia and globally is building data centers. In the US, they are not only building data centers, but they are also hosting large learning models. They're using AI and reselling AI services effectively. Selling these cloud and AI services is key. If you think about it, routing these services from lower to orbit often has much lower latency than routing domestically. For example, if you look at the US market, almost all streaming of ChatGPT and Gemini in LATAM markets gets streamed from the US at 20 to 40 milliseconds of latency, which can be quite high. It is similar in Singapore and Southeast Asia. If a business wants to use AI capabilities, they have to route all the way back to Singapore through undersea cables and then stream it back to, let's say, Bali. That's a 50 to 55-millisecond latency, which completely destroys real-time use cases. But if you route it from lower to orbit, the latency becomes less than 10 milliseconds—one-fifth of the time—which means it's nearly real-time. These are the kinds of things telcos and telco CTOs are thinking about. When we talk to our customers, each one of them now wants to partner with us on our space side. They've been working with us on the ground, they understand the technology, and they see the huge value potential in space. I think that's what's happening. They're figuring out how they can play a role. They can still remain tied to a nation's security and communications infrastructure to provide that service, but also not lose out on the upside of space today.
Jeremy Au: I think it's really interesting because we're talking about the different niches. I love what you just said, which is that people underappreciate that telcos are a national asset. There may be fewer telcos in a country as they compete with one another, become more nationalized, or go for economies of scale. But there will never be a case where a telco sells to Starlink. You can't imagine the government of Indonesia, Vietnam, or China allowing that to happen. There is some level of support on the infra side. What do you think is the ideal world of that partnership between yourself, telcos, and consumers? Would it be, for example, they handle the ground level and sell SIM cards to consumers and devices, but then they're using you for the backhaul, remote connectivity, or data centers? How does that partnership look from your perspective?
Rohit Jha: Number one, you're right about the government stepping in. To be honest, even the US government can clearly just go with Starlink, but they're choosing to have redundancy. When you're thinking about national security generally, you cannot just rely on one vendor. You have to adopt a multi-vendor approach. Otherwise, you are screwed the moment something happens catastrophically with one vendor. Even though that may be the best service or option available today, the need for redundancy is a lot more amplified in Europe and Asia. From the customers we talk to, there's an added issue of people thinking that Elon and SpaceX are unstable to work with as partners and could turn around at any moment. While they're cautiously working, they're also looking at geographically and politically neutral secondary bodies, or companies providing different capabilities that serve the same purpose. That's where we get a lot of incoming interest from our government and telco partners. What I think will happen is a lot of the use cases—whether video streaming, video calling, or social media broadcasts—were tied heavily to the capabilities present in the current telcos. We cannot just expect linear growth there. Space is going to give you a new latency paradigm for end-to-end latency from data center to data center. It's going to give you a new cost paradigm for running things in space. There's significantly more power available. In terms of real estate, you can technically grow a data center to a nearly infinite size in space. It can be severely large compared to the size of data centers you have on the ground, and there's no real restriction. A lot of the limits that people have on telecom infrastructure on the ground get taken away, opening up very unique capabilities. We are working with our telco and government partners now to identify what those opportunities could be in terms of service offerings. Is that a new super broadband you could offer that has the lowest latency for businesses? Is that a secure mesh? From space, you can run post-quantum cryptography. For example, all our networks are now quantum-safe. Trying to re-architect that into the entire Singtel network is going to take a long time. If you partner with new space companies like us that are already built on these advanced technologies, you bring these new capabilities directly into your network. It allows you to offer advanced encryption capabilities that would have taken years for the existing network to implement. A lot of this is changing by definition. Space allows typically nationally locked telcos to have broader ambitions. It allows you to flex your muscles beyond just your country. If you have a good team and a good service offering, you could reasonably expand your base cross-regionally. I think you're going to see that within the next two years. In the last few years, countries like Indonesia, Malaysia, and India went through huge M\&As with all their telcos. There's been a lot of national consolidation, but you will start seeing that happen regionally in the next two years as people realize space gives them the chance to spread out even more beyond their borders. That's the next step.
Jeremy Au: In some ways, that makes you a better partner for telcos than SpaceX, primarily because of those three factors. One is the laser part being more geographically focused and providing higher throughput or speed, making it a natural fit that is less competitive with their business models. Thirdly, you are part of the diversification piece because SpaceX is the big gorilla currently in the room.
Rohit Jha: A hundred percent. Even if you look at Starlink and SpaceX, a good example is the telcos in Taiwan. We work with all three telcos. The most aggressive one is Taiwan Mobile, which is one of our key partners there, but we work with Chunghwa and Far EasTone as well. They all have disaster recovery solutions which use Starlink. When a typhoon or earthquake hits, they deploy their kits to get some internet back. Last November, there was a huge typhoon—Typhoon Ragasa—that hit the southern coast of Taiwan with massive floods. It washed away a bunch of bridges. When you deploy Starlink, you can deploy a few kits here and there, and it has just enough bandwidth to help first responders. It's restricted to only a certain number of people because the bandwidth is so low, especially when getting it from space. It's a great solution to deploy instantly within the first hour. However, that typhoon knocked out a bridge which had a fiber cable providing internet to over 50 villages. You can't just deploy kits across 50 villages and try to get that up and running. Within two hours, our teams went to that place and set up a laser link which powered almost 20 gigabits per second. We bridged that break effectively in two hours, restoring internet to 50 villages downstream. That's the difference. As a space network comes up, telcos can take our optical ground station and put it somewhere that allows them to quickly switch over to a much higher bandwidth. While Starlink is great for first responders and getting on-site very quickly, when they really need to restore connectivity to a larger base, they have to find another partner. It comes down to which tool works for what use case.
Jeremy Au: Definitely interesting, because I think it's a way for you to power their existing networks versus disrupting or competing with them.
Rohit Jha: We are very strong on the partnership approach. There's also obviously a very clear sense of dread by the telcos because now you have SpaceX. Because of Elon's brand and SpaceX's brand, everyone knows it, and they have started offering direct-to-cell. Their experience is going to be significantly worse than your normal telco because you are getting it beamed from a cell tower that is 500 kilometers away, but everyone's going to try it. Every telco in every country is going to lose some percentage of their subscribers in the short term to Starlink, until maybe six months later when these subscribers realize the internet sucks, but that will still do the damage. There is a growing concern about how they continue to make sure that such customers don't walk away and that they don't have this bleed. That's where partnering with other space companies, which don't compromise performance and capability but can still bridge the gap that space provides, is key.
Jeremy Au: Could you share a personal story about a time that you've been brave?
Rohit Jha: I think every time we pitch to a customer, I feel like we're taking a leap. But personally, before I started Transcelestial, my elder brother and I were celebrating his birthday. He used to live in Denmark, and we were in Germany. This was around December 19, very close to Christmas. We were in Munich, it was midnight, and we decided to go to a club to celebrate. We walked out of the Marienplatz area, and there were these two guys who asked, "Hey guys, do you need weed?" My brother realized it was not a good situation. These guys obviously looked dangerous. As we started to walk away, they took out knives and demanded our money and cards. My brother handed everything to them, and we started walking away. The moment they turned, I felt like if I see injustice or a situation where we need to do something, I'll just jump in. So I thought, "Screw this, why should they have our cash and cards?" I pushed one of the guys, grabbed the wallet back, and we started running. We ran for 20 minutes with four guys chasing us with knives in the middle of the night in Germany, with no idea where things would go. It was winter, so there was absolutely no one on the street, and my brother and I had not been working out. We were seconds away from running out of breath. Lo and behold, in front of us, we suddenly saw a giant neon McDonald's sign. We ended up running in there and told the manager to call the police. The guy laughed and said, "Ah, it's okay, this happens." That is what comes immediately to mind. From a work point of view, when we were working with the telco divisions, that business was so good and very stable. At some point, our board was like, "Why even bother about space? You guys are doing really well on the telco division. Just stick to doing this." My co-founder and I felt that if the company were to die tomorrow and we never gave space a chance, which was our original vision, it would not work. Without telling the board, we took some capital out. Most of our team is ex-space, so we gave them extra beer and pizza and said, "Look, you have this much money. Let's get to space, and if we are successful, everyone will be happy and no one will say anything." I think we were being stupidly brave, but it paid off, and we are off to the races right now. Having a mentality of taking insane amounts of risk is absolutely critical to success.
Jeremy Au: That sounds like a big push on both sides of the story. Fighting robbers, and the other one is finally getting to space. I am torn between these two stories. But fighting those robbers, weren't you scared? Weren't you worried that you're going to die or that this is stupid to do? What were you thinking at that moment when you pushed the guy?
Rohit Jha: There's a really good quote from Star Trek: The Next Generation, which is my favorite. Picard at one point says that it's easier to be brave for others than for yourself. In that case, I was thinking more about how I could keep my brother safe rather than myself. It's easy when you have loved ones to be brave for them rather than for yourself. When my co-founder and I make decisions in the company, we feel that this technology is critical for humanity to become a multi-planetary species. Whether it's us or some other company in the future, they will have to build these technologies and capabilities to get humanity multi-planetary. Not only Elon, but a large number of people in our generation grew up on science fiction with this dream. It's something we have been looking forward to. So, it's easy for us to be brave for others, saying that irrespective of where we personally end up in this situation, we have to take the leap forward because there is a greater calling.
Jeremy Au: Would you do it again if this situation happened tonight in San Francisco?
Rohit Jha: I have realized that it's better to give your credit card and walk away.
Jeremy Au: Cancel it straight away afterwards\! Using your internet speed with zero latency.
Rohit Jha: To be honest, I was in banking, and life didn't have the meaning it has today. It didn't have the goals that I have today. I think that's why a lot of people say when they have their first child, their attitude and meaning toward life changes. There are moments in your life where what's most important and what's driving you determines how you behave and how you react. At that point in time, I was just doing a job and there was no grander purpose to life. Now, I have that. Taking risks that are uncalled for and don't really help me achieve the vision that I have for my life, the company, and the future of humanity doesn't make sense anymore.
Jeremy Au: On that note, thank you so much for sharing. Let me summarize the big takeaways. First of all, thanks so much for sharing the founding story of Transcelestial from a personal basis—you always had this dream, you were in finance, you were an engineer, and you got to learn how the internet works. It all clicked together to make Transcelestial happen. Secondly, thanks for sharing about Transcelestial versus SpaceX, not necessarily as head-to-head competitors, but in terms of the differences in product-market fit, technology approach, and go-to-market approach. I thought it was fascinating to view this from the prism of rural consumers, first responders, telcos, and other folks that are important customers of this approach. Lastly, thanks so much for sharing about the mission. I thought it was fascinating to hear about some of the decisions around getting to the end goal of giving everybody the internet as fast as possible on an interstellar basis, while also being thoughtful about the intermediate steps. That involves working with telcos on terrestrial infrastructure, working on space, working with ground stations, and bridging a broken bridge in Taiwan.
Rohit Jha: I think often the journey ends up being a lot more fulfilling than the actual destination.
