He left his banking job to start a space startup called Transcelestial.

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

“It was in banking where I finally realized why the Internet sucks,” he said. “As part of my role in e-commerce, what you’re really looking for is optimizing latency between the world’s shopping centers. It’s very important to know how fast you can go from New York to Chicago, from Chicago to London… and who has the fastest latencies.”

It found that most of the world’s Internet comes from a vast network of fiber optic cables strung along the ocean floor, carrying data between continents globally. These undersea cables can cost billions of dollars to install and often create bottlenecks and break as a result of ocean activity, he said.

In particular, because the process of bringing the Internet to the people can be so expensive, the companies responsible for bringing connectivity into the hands of the people are often motivated to “invest only in those cities where they have a sufficiently high probability of return.” of investment,” he said. .

“So it all comes down to an economic game, and the incentives are very misaligned 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 never exists unless we are eliminated… and data will always grow,” meaning the divide between the haves and the have-nots will also continue to widen, unless there is a sea. change in the way Internet is provided, he said.

After several years on the job, Jha realized that banking was not for him.

“I was lucky, 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 where I felt like a cog in the entire company. organization,” he said.

Additionally, after growing up with a love of science fiction, he said he painted a kind of “utopia”: “a world where I was sure that when I grew up, we would have transportation to the Moon and Mars.”

“I realized that we are still living in a world where we had been promised a future that was not fulfilled, and that was very frustrating, and I just didn’t want to live in that anymore,” he said.

Jha eventually decided to leave after realizing, “You have one life and (I) prefer to work on things where (I’m) sitting on the edge of the unknown.” So in 2015, he quit his job, took a year off to travel, and founded Transcelestial shortly after.

In December 2016, Transcelestial was created after Jha met his co-founder Mohammad Danesh through a Singapore-based startup accelerator called Entrepreneur First.

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

After much discussion, their goal was to create “the largest telecommunications company in the space possible over the next few decades,” Jha said. They decided the best way to do this would be with lasers.

“Lasers have the ability to carry data…for decades, that laser has been running through fiber optic cables, and that’s what powers our homes, offices, 5G data centers, everything,” he said. “What we’ve done is…take that laser from inside a fiber and run it wirelessly.”

“This means that you don’t get the speed of fiber, but the price economics and speed of deployment of wireless technologies. We can dramatically reduce the years and months, to days and weeks, when installing Internet not only for a home , but even for a town or a city,” Jha said.