He quit his job at a bank to create a space startup called Transcelestial

After graduating from university in 2011, Jha went into banking and worked in the high-frequency trading department at the Royal Bank of Canada. While working at the bank, Jha discovered a problem.

“It was in banking that I finally understood why the Internet sucks,” he said. “As part of my role in e-commerce, you’re really looking to optimize latency between world trade centers. It’s about how fast you can go from New York to Chicago, Chicago to London … and who has the fastest delays.”

He discovered that most of the world’s Internet comes from a vast network of fiber-optic cables laid across the ocean floor that transmit data between continents around the world. Laying these undersea cables can cost billions of dollars and is often bottlenecked and broken by ocean activity, he said.

Notably, the process of bringing people to the Internet can be very expensive, so the companies responsible for providing connections to people are often motivated “to invest only in cities where they have a reasonably high chance of ROI,” he said. .

“So it really comes down to an economic game, and the incentives are very different across the board,” Jha said. While tier one cities like San Francisco or New York get priority, less developed markets or remote villages may not get the same access.

“There will never be a future where the Internet will never exist until we are destroyed… and data will always grow,” meaning that the gap between the haves and have-nots will also continue to widen unless there is a sea change in , as provided by the Internet, he said.

After a few years of work, Jah realized that banking was not for him.

“I was fortunate because it was a carefully selected team across the company, and some of the best people I’ve ever worked with in my life — very impressive people — but … there were many times when I felt that the cog throughout the organization,” he said.

Also, having grown up loving science fiction, he said it paints a kind of “utopia” — “a world where I was sure by the time I grew up we’d have transportation to the moon and Mars.”

“I realized that we were continuing to live in a world where we were promised a future (that wasn’t realized) and it was very frustrating and I just didn’t want to continue living in that,” he said.

Jah finally decided to leave after realizing, “You only have one life, and (I) better work on where (I) sit on the edge of the unknown.” So in 2015, he quit his job, took a year off to travel, and soon after founded Transcelestial.

Transcelestial was formed in December 2016 after Jha met his co-founder Mohammad Danesh through a Singaporean startup accelerator called Entrepreneur First.

“The first day I met Danesh, he was exactly the person I needed,” Jha said. “So we went to (an Indian restaurant) and we had biryani early, we kept discussing, we had a second biryani, kept discussing, and eventually it became clear that we wanted to start this company together.”

After much discussion, they decided to create “the largest telecommunications company in the space possible for the next several decades,” Jha said. They decided that the best way to do this was with lasers.

“Lasers are capable of carrying data … for decades that laser has been going through fiber optic cables and that’s what’s powering our homes, our offices, our 5g data centers, everything,” he said. “What we’ve done is we’ve … taken this laser from inside the fiber and run it over a wireless network.”

“This means that it gets the speed of fiber optic, but the cost savings and speed of deployment of wireless technology. We can dramatically reduce the years and months, days and weeks in setting up the Internet not only in the home, but even in the village or city,” said Ja.