Three engineers who worked together at SpaceX – Travis Brashears, Cameron Ramos and Serena Grown-Haeberli – have launched a new startup. Their company, Mesh Optical Technologies, has raised $50 million in Series A funding. Thrive Capital led the round.
The founders worked at SpaceX on optical communications systems that would keep thousands of Starlink internet satellites in constant communication. The new company aims to mass produce optical transceivers. These devices convert optical signals transmitted via fiber or laser into electrical signals for computers.
According to company executives, the limitations of the existing optical transceiver market became clear during the development of a new generation of satellites that require high computing power, which prompted them to create a new solution.
Optical transceivers play a critical role, especially in data centers built for training and running large artificial intelligence models. They allow multiple GPUs to work in parallel and in coordination. AOI, a US-based company, won a $4 billion contract last year to supply components for Amazon Web Services (AWS) data centers.
Mesh Optical Technologies CEO Brashears said that the number of transceivers used in large GPU clusters is much higher than expected: “If someone is talking about a million-GPU cluster, you have to multiply that by four to five times to calculate the number of transceivers there.”
The company plans to reach a production capacity of 1,000 units per day by the end of the year. The goal is to start the certification process for large-scale orders in 2027-2028.
Currently, the optical transceiver market is dominated by Chinese companies. Mesh believes that building its supply chain outside of this country will give it a strategic advantage. The founders and investors see this as a preventive measure against future national security risks.
