Travis Brashears, Cameron Ramos and Serena Grown-Haeberli began working together at SpaceX, developing optical communications links that keep thousands of Starlink internet satellites in constant contact.
Now, the three engineers are 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 fiber or lasers into electrical signals for computers. CEO Brashears, President Ramos and VP of Product Grown-Haeberli realized the opportunity when designing a new generation of SpaceX satellites hungry for computing forced them to evaluate the optical transceiver market and saw its limitations.
Optical transceivers are especially important for data centers aimed at training and running large deep learning models because they allow multiple GPUs to work together. An established US supplier, AOI, won a contract worth $4 billion to supply data for AWS data centers last year.
“Someone will brag about a million GPU cluster; you have to multiply by four to five for the number of transceivers in that cluster,” Brashears explained.
The company aims to build 1,000 units per day within the year so they can begin 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 that country. Although trade restrictions have yet to affect the market, founders and supporters see themselves facing a national security dilemma.
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“If AI is the most important technology in many generations (which we believe is true), having critical parts of AI data center capital in misaligned/competitive countries is a problem,” Thrive partner Philip Clark wrote in TechCrunch. “For the foreseeable future, Mesh solves our need for better ways to connect if we want to continue to scale artificial intelligence.”
The challenge for Mesh, the founders say, is performing automated manufacturing techniques that are not common in the US industry. So much of this know-how is concentrated in China that even European equipment suppliers are waiting for Chinese customers — the standard recruitment form for a German company asks for a Chinese company registration number.
By co-locating design and production, the founders hope to realize more efficient and lower component costs. Their current design removes a commonly used but demanding component, which Ramos said could reduce GPU cluster power usage by 3% to 5%, a significant amount as overscalers seek to squeeze as much performance as possible from their systems.
Data centers are just the beginning of Mesh’s ambitions. the company sees optical wavelength communications as the next paradigm in communications.
“The world has focused primarily 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 connect everything, not just computers, but that’s where we’re starting.”
