Travis Brashears, Cameron Ramos and Serena Grown-Haeberli began collaborating 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 laser into electrical signals for computers. CEO Brashears, President Ramos, and VP of Product Grown-Haeberli realized the opportunity when designing a new generation of compute-hungry SpaceX satellites forced them to assess the optical transceiver market, and they saw its limitations.
Optical transceivers are particularly important for data centers aimed at training and operating large deep learning models, because they allow multiple GPUs to work in concert. One established U.S. supplier, AOI, won a contract worth $4 billion to provide components 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’s goal is to manufacture a thousand 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 firms and suppliers, and Mesh sees an advantage in building its supply chain outside of that country. While trade restrictions haven’t impacted the market yet, the founders and their backers see themselves as getting in front of a national security dilemma.
"If AI is the most important technology in several generations (which we believe to be true), to have critical parts of AI data center capex run through misaligned/competitive countries is a problem,” Thrive Partner Philip Clark wrote TechCrunch. “In the immediate term, Mesh is solving our need for better ways to do interconnect if we want to keep scaling AI."
The challenge for Mesh, the founders say, is executing lights-out, automated manufacturing techniques, which aren’t common in U.S. industry. So much of this expertise is concentrated in China that even European equipment suppliers expect Chinese customers — one German firm’s standard intake form asks for a Chinese company registration number.
By co-locating design and production, the founders hope to realize more efficient and 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%, a meaningful amount as hyperscalers seek to wring as much efficiency out of their systems as possible. Data centers are just the beginning of Mesh’s aspirations; the company sees optical wavelength communications as the next paradigm in communications.
“The world has primarily focused on [radio frequencies] for a long time,” Brashears told TechCrunch. “We want to be at the precipice of transition from RF to photonics…we want to interconnect everything, and not just computers, but that’s where we’re starting.”
-TechCrunch