Travis Brashears, Cameron Ramos, and Selina Groun-Haeberg began working together at SpaceX to develop an optical communications link that permanently connects thousands of Starlink Internet satellites.
The three engineers are now co-founders of Mesh Optical Technologies, a Los Angeles startup that announced a $50 million Series A led by Thrive Capital on Tuesday.
Mesh aims to mass produce optical transceivers, devices that convert optical signals from fibers or lasers into electrical signals for computers. Brashears CEO Ramos, President Ramos, and Vice President of Product Groun Heberg recognized this opportunity when they were required to evaluate the optical transceiver market and recognized its limitations while designing a new generation of compute-intensive SpaceX satellites.
Optical transceivers are especially important for data centers for training and operating large-scale deep learning models because they allow multiple GPUs to work together. AOI, one of America’s oldest suppliers, won contracts worth $4 billion last year to provide components for AWS data centers.
“People brag about a million GPU clusters, but you have to multiply the number of transceivers in that cluster by four or five,” Brasears explained.
The company’s goal is to produce 1,000 units per day by the end of the year, with the aim of qualifying for bulk orders in 2027 and 2028.
The optical transceiver market is dominated by Chinese companies and suppliers, and Mesh sees an advantage in building its supply chain outside of China. Although trade restrictions have not yet affected the market, the founders and their supporters believe they are facing a national security dilemma.
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“If AI is the most important technology in generations—and we believe that to be the case—then running a significant portion of AI data center capital investment in countries that are misaligned or uncompetitive is problematic,” Thrive partner Philip Clark wrote on TechCrunch. “If we want to continue to scale AI in the foreseeable future, mesh solves the need for a better way to interconnect.”
The challenge for Mesh, founders say, is implementing automated manufacturing techniques that are not common in the U.S. industry. Much of this expertise is concentrated in China, so even European equipment suppliers are looking to Chinese customers. A German company’s standard recruitment form asks for the Chinese company’s registration number.
By co-locating design and production, the founders hope to achieve more efficient, lower-cost components. Their current design removes one commonly used but power-hungry component, which Ramos said could reduce GPU cluster power usage by 3% to 5%. This is a meaningful amount as hyperscalers try to squeeze as much efficiency as possible out of their systems.
Data centers are just the beginning of your mesh aspirations. The company believes that optical wavelength communications is the next paradigm in communications.
“The world has been primarily focused on (radio frequencies) for a long time,” Brashears told TechCrunch. “We want to be on the precipice of the transition from RF to photonics…We want to interconnect everything, not just computers, and that’s a start.”
