How Lasers Could Replace Undersea Cables & Reshape Global Internet | Rohit Jha - E698
episode
BRAVE Southeast Asia Tech: Singapore, Indonesia, Vietnam, Philippines, Thailand & Malaysia Startups, Founders & Venture Capital VC (English)
32 min
2 speakers
7 chapters
transcribed 17 days ago
Transcript
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Transcript generated automatically by AI and may contain errors.
What is Transcelestial and how does it use laser communications to replace undersea cables?
Anyone who is not SpaceX is signing us up. So in the last three months we have signed up close to six satellite manufacturers and we are doing a satellite manufacturer a month scale now. Without telling the board we took some capital out. Most of our team is X 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. So taking insane amounts of risk mentality is absolutely critical to success.
Welcome to Brave. Learn from Southeast Asia's best tech leaders. Build the future, learn from our past, and stay human in between. No BS on success. I'm Jeremy Al, Venture Capitalist, Sierra founder, Harvard MBA, science fiction nerd, and dad of two daughters. Every week, we debate startup news, interview change makers, answer listener questions, and share personal insights. Join our movement of over 40,000 members and get transcripts, resources, and community at www.bravesdea.com. Um Stay well and stay brave. Hello Rohe. How are you? Good to have you finally on the show. Hey Jeremy. Ah, it's great. I'm glad to come. Rohe, exciting to see Transcelestial and the evolution over time. So wanna catch up a little bit on that and make sure we cover all of those points.
But please, Rohead, for those who don't know you yet, could you introduce yourself?
I am one of the co founders and the CEO for Trans Celestial. We have invented this technology which uses lasers to transmit internet worldwide. Today we are the world's largest manufacturer of this technology. And right now the company is working towards building an orbital ring in low Earth orbit, which basically surpasses the undersea cable and is used for both global communications and then orbital data centers effectively.
How did you even decide to build and launch Transcelestial?
How did Rohit Jha’s background in engineering and investment banking shape the company’s vision?
part of the entrepreneur first cohort which is an accelerator they bring like individuals together who can build something at the intersection of their interests or their mainly their expertise. I was looking at the breakthrough initiative and thinking about how humanity as it scales amongst the stars, what are the things that's going to be important for it. When you think deeply about such a problem, what really comes down to is three major pillars that any civilized One is the first one. transportation, so going from point A to point B. The second is energy. So 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. So 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. So 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 we 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 to still be connected. And so when we looked around, we didn't see any company actually building this technology.
And that's the genesis of Trans NST. 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.
What's interesting is that your personal transition there, it's a big jump from Nanyang Technological University in Singapore, your electrical and electronic engineering degree. One path I'm just saying is I don't know, you join aerospace or DBS as a bank, as a engineer. How do you make that personal set of decisions from how you graduated to being a founder? I think
As all engineers do after university I joined investment banking and it was quite easy just looking at all the offers on the table and it was like that pays the most and then just go for that.
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Chapters
7 chapters
1
What is Transcelestial and how does it use laser communications to replace undersea cables?
0:00–2:01
2
How did Rohit Jha’s background in engineering and investment banking shape the company’s vision?
2:01–5:22
3
What product‑market fit did Transcelestial achieve with telco partners before building the orbital ring?
5:22–9:32
4
How does Transcelestial’s laser‑based satellite network differ from SpaceX’s Starlink?
9:32–13:57
5
Why can a 40‑satellite orbital ring replace traditional undersea cables and host space‑based data centres?
13:57–20:53
6
How does low‑Earth‑orbit latency improve AI workloads compared to undersea cable routes?
20:53–27:48
7
What happened when a typhoon destroyed a fibre bridge in Taiwan and how did laser links restore service?
27:48–32:15
Speakers
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