The Taara team is graduating from The Moonshot Factory to become an independent company. The company raised a round of funding led by Series X Capital to deploy and scale Taara’s groundbreaking new approach to wireless optical communications, which uses light to deliver high speed, high-capacity connectivity over long distances.
As Mahesh Krishnaswamy, CEO of Taara shared in a recent episode of The Moonshot Podcast, the journey to becoming a company has been a series of adventures. Inspired by Loon’s breakthrough work establishing connectivity between two stratospheric balloons, the philosophy building Taara has always been to take technology out of the lab and test it with partners to learn as quickly as possible. From beaming connectivity over the world's deepest river, to deploying in densely populated neighborhoods, every pilot project and every partnership has helped bring them closer to overcoming the stubborn connectivity gaps that prevent nearly 3 billion people from accessing the internet.
"My passion for connectivity was sparked while I was applying for universities in the U.S. from an internet cafe in Chennai," said Krishnaswamy. "Listening to the beeps and chirps of the dial up modem. I became obsessed with connectivity, and I wanted to bring its economic, educational and social benefits to more people. Our entire Taara team shares this passion — a diverse group of manufacturing experts, telco industry veterans, optical and photonics engineers and more."
Moving to the Light Generation
The connectivity challenge is only becoming more urgent as the world’s demand for data increases. Fiber is the gold standard for high speed connectivity, but it's often difficult to lay because it's costly, impractical or geographically impossible. Where fiber fails to reach, operators and service providers often turn to RF to fill the gap. However, traditional RF bands are congested and running out of available bandwidth, making it harder to support 5G expansion and keep up the growing global demand for fast, reliable connectivity.
Taara Lightbridge brings fast, fiber-like internet access to areas where it’s too difficult or expensive to install traditional fiber, like in dense city neighborhoods, over rivers and seas or across rugged terrains and national parks. In the same way fiber optic cables in the ground use light to carry data, Taara uses narrow, invisible light beams to transmit information through the air, at speeds as high as 20 gigabits per second and across distances up to 20 km. Taara’s Lightbridge units deliver high speed, high-quality internet and require only a few hours to set up, without the time and cost associated with digging trenches or stringing cables.
Chasing light as far as it will go
Taara has already deployed hundreds of links in more than a dozen countries. They are delivering commercial service in partnership with Airtel, Liquid Intelligent Technologies and Liberty Networks, as well as pioneering new approaches to wireless optical communications deployments with the likes of T-Mobile and Vodafone. They are also working with innovators and researchers to explore new applications for their recently launched silicon photonic chip which uses light to transmit high speed data through the air.