These lasers can carry huge amounts of data at high speeds over long distances but are complex to build. Explaining how Transcelestial’s technology works, Jha says: “Transmitting connectivity through lasers is similar to beaming a laser as thin as a single strand of hair to a smartphone-sized window [on commercial telecommunication systems] 3 kilometres away, while both the laser and window are moving and subject to changing weather conditions.” 

The ability of Transcelestial’s technology to work in varying weather conditions was tested recently when it deployed its proprietary wireless lasers at Coachella this year. Several of its Centauri devices were set up to give high-speed 5G connection to festival-goers in the middle of the remote Californian valley, where dust storms and wind gusts can reach speeds of up to 90 km/h. 

The company worked with T-Mobile to place the devices at the cell sites and connect them with the US telecommunications giant’s area tower. Being the size of a shoebox, the devices were quick to set up and less affected by weather conditions, minimising the logistical and connectivity issues that traditional network infrastructure would have typically had at such events. 

The devices also have a built-in AI system that analyses in real-time the level of signal damage caused by the weather and responds by adjusting the laser power needed to keep the connection stable.

Read more: Singapore startup Transcelestial partnered with T-Mobile to offer 5G at Coachella

Due to hefty costs, the development of laser technology has traditionally been limited to defence companies with millions in R&D budget, says Jha. Transcelestial’s rise in the industry in the past eight years and its ability to launch what it says is the world’s largest manufacturing line for commercial laser communications technology, he adds, “comes down to first principles”. 

“You have to heavily discard what people think is impossible or complex. You have to have a healthy disrespect for what experts in your field say.” 

As someone who grew up reading science fiction and fantasy books—and hasn’t stopped—Jha says he always thinks about the possible futures that humanity can have. 

Read more: Derek Tsang on directing Netflix’s viral sci-fi series ‘3 Body Problem’ and why Wong Kar-wai is his hero

“The job of entrepreneurs is to think what kind of future we want to live in. What would 50 years from now look like that I would absolutely love to live in? And then in that future, what is the thing I care about? Then walking backwards from there, seeing how you can make it happen.” 

Fuelled by that thought, he and his co-founder Dr Mohammad Danesh started Transcelestial in 2016. 

Jha was born and raised in Jamshedpur, a major industrial city in eastern India named after the industrialist Jamshedji Tata, who opened Asia’s first steel plant there and laid the foundation of the influential Tata Group. Given the nature of its main industry, Jha says it resembled a dystopian city from the movies when he was growing up.

“At 7 o’clock every evening, they would pour molten steel or iron down like a waterfall and it was heated to the surface temperatures of the Sun. The heat generated would emit a red light, which would light up the entire night sky,” he says.

Read more: 5 quotes that reveal Ratan Tata’s philosophies for success

He studied at the Loyola School Jamshedpur, and this was where his interest in science fiction would start. Run by Jesuit priests, the private primary and secondary school had a library filled with diverse literature from all over the world—from Russian math books to theology texts from Vatican City to science and technology magazines from Silicon Valley. And students were encouraged to read them, which Jha heeded.

“[The school] loosely followed the national curriculum but placed extreme amounts of focus on subjects like astronomy, mathematics, computer science, physicals, chemistry and literature,” he recalls. 

Jha was a member of the astronomy club, where he and his friends would spend nights on the rooftop gazing at the sky and hand-drawing star charts.

Over time, he would amass his own library of sci-fi books and found himself hooked onto the works of Isaac Asimov, a Russian-born American author and biochemist famed for his Foundation series and regarded as one of the “Big Three” sci-fi writers.

Read more: 5 mind-bending novels that use science to explore thought-provoking ideas

Jha’s passion for sci-fi was further amplified by his early access to technology. When he was ten, his father bought him a second-hand computer, which he would use to code simple games.  

He was later accepted into a local engineering university, but chose to move to Singapore to “step out of the comfort zone and learn more about how the world is”. He studied electrical engineering and computer science at Nanyang Technological University Singapore, and during this time joined a project on Singapore’s first locally built satellite, X-Sat, which was sent into orbit in 2011. 

After graduating, he went into investment banking, which he jokes “as all engineers do”, working in foreign exchange. But all this while, he couldn’t stop thinking about his next step. “I wanted to work in an area or place where you couldn’t google or check things, where you would be at the forefront [of innovation],” he says. 

The only way, it seems, was to build his own company. When he left banking, he took a gap year to learn the ropes, travelling to different cities—from Amsterdam to Bengaluru—and immersing himself in their startup ecosystems.

After a stint with his friends’ tech startup and feeling confident with his research, he settled back in Singapore and established Transcelestial.

The startup got its first breakthrough in 2017 when it was selected for the accelerator programme of SK Telecom. It would go on to work with the South Korean telco to demonstrate its technology publicly for the first time—it helped to upgrade the backbone internet connectivity of a public library near Seoul, boosting its network bandwidth by 20 times. 

Transcelestial has since worked with other telcos and technology companies across Asia, Australia, North America and the UAE. This includes Japan’s NTT, America’s Wesco and more recently, Indonesia’s Telkomsel. 

In 2022, it opened its Terabit Factory in Singapore to meet growing global demand. The 2,000 sqft production facility can produce up to 2,400 Centauri devices a year, the largest volume of any lasercomms producer globally. 

This year, Jha says the focus is on widening the company’s footprint in the US. Showing his commitment, the entrepreneur moved to San Francisco in September to spearhead this on the ground.

A question Jha gets asked a lot, particularly by investors, is how Transcelestial’s technology differs from Starlink’s satellite-based internet. 

“I have a whole writeup about this because it comes up a lot in investment due diligence,” Jha laughs. “The short answer is Starlink is great for if you’re on an island or mountain. Once you’re in a city like Manila or Jakarta or smaller towns even, where the population density is so high, it’s not able to sustain the amount of bandwidth needed. It’s not yet fast enough to compete with terrestrial 4G or 5G.” 

For comparison, Starlink offers download speeds between 50 to 250 Mbps (megabits per second) while Jha says Transcelestial’s start at 10 Gbps (gigabits per second) and can go up to 100 Gbps.

Read more: Elon Musk’s Starlink internet service now in the Philippines, how does it compare with local providers?

With an eye on humanity’s future beyond Earth, this past June, Transcelestial announced a groundbreaking partnership with Axiom Space, a US-based private space infrastructure company that is building the successor of Nasa’s International Space Station (ISS), which will be deorbited in early 2031. With this collaboration, Transcelestial will help convert part of the replacement station, Axiom Station, into a data centre. “This will effectively bring data closer to customers, which reduces latency and increases bandwidth,” Jha explains.

This feeds into Jha’s longer-term goal for Transcelestial to establish a communication network that can “sustain robotics and human expansion into deep space”. 

It also goes back to the one thing he cares about that fuels his vision for Transcelestial. “The future that most of us want to grow up in is a future where you walk out and you see your regular transport going to the moon, or you see us having established colonies outside Earth,” he says. “This is the dream of countless in my generation, and the generation before and probably after. And we will get there.”

Read more: Christina Koch will be the first woman NASA sends to the moon—in a spacesuit designed by Prada

We asked Jha some quickfire questions to learn more about what makes him tick.

What’s one of your biggest takeaways as a founder?

Rohit Jha (RJ): As leaders and founders, you have to grow faster than the company. The three fastest ways to do this are to read as much as possible, hire an executive coach to understand what areas you’re lacking in and build a network. 

The best advice you’ve ever received?

RJ: Ninety-nine per cent of the leadership advice you find in books, podcasts, TV shows and even from your board or investors is great if you want to build a $1 billion company. If you want to build a $100 billion or a $1 trillion company, that’s a completely separate playbook. 

Not all advice is good advice. You have to understand what advice is applicable when and if it is applicable to the company you want to build. 

So what are you looking for now? 

RJ: I want to make sure that my team has the resources to run for long. I won’t be able to give all the advice to the people who need it, but my leadership team and I can pull in external people who can give us the right advice at the right time. So the idea is to kind of bring in advisors not only for leadership but functional advisors across the board.

Do you think technical people make better leaders?

RJ: I think so. I was talking to a friend about how programming should be part of medical courses because, in most engineering courses, the one thing that’s drilled into you is RCA—root cause analysis. For every single thing, why why why—why is this happening in a certain way, you drill until you find the answer. This skill set, subconsciously, is great for when you’re building a startup. So I do think good technical people make great leaders and have built some of the strongest companies today. 

This article is part of Founder Stories, a series dedicated to discovering the untold stories and challenges of today’s entrepreneurs on their climb to the top.

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