At SpaceX, Travis Brashears, Cameron Ramos, and Serena Grown-Haeberli worked on the invisible threads that bind thousands of Starlink satellites together: optical communication links. Their job was to ensure satellites could exchange data seamlessly in orbit, forming a resilient, high-speed network in space. That experience exposed a bottleneck back on Earth.
While developing a new generation of compute-intensive satellites, the trio took a hard look at the optical transceiver market. These devices convert optical signals from fibre or lasers into electrical signals that computers can process. What they found was a sector struggling to keep pace with rising performance demands. So they left to build their own solution.
This week, their Los Angeles–based startup, Mesh Optical Technologies, announced a $50 million Series A led by Thrive Capital. Brashears now serves as CEO, Ramos as President, and Grown-Haeberli as VP of Product.
Powering the GPU age
Optical transceivers sit at the heart of modern data centres. They allow clusters of GPUs to communicate at extraordinary speeds, a requirement for training and running large deep learning models. Without them, scaling advanced compute would be impossible.
The stakes are enormous. Last year, Applied Optoelectronics Inc. (AOI) secured a $4 billion contract to supply components for Amazon Web Services data centres.
Mesh believes the current offerings fall short in terms of efficiency and manufacturability. By redesigning the transceiver architecture, the team eliminated a widely used but power-hungry component. According to Ramos, that change alone could reduce GPU cluster energy consumption by 3% to 5%, a substantial gain for hyperscalers chasing incremental efficiency at massive scale.
Rebuilding manufacturing at home
The optical transceiver market is largely dominated by Chinese suppliers. While trade restrictions have not yet disrupted supply, Mesh sees geopolitical risk on the horizon. Its strategy is to build a supply chain independent of China and get ahead of what it views as a potential national security issue. This ambition comes with execution risk.
Advanced, fully automated “lights-out” manufacturing is rare in the United States. Much of the technical know-how is concentrated in China. Even though some European equipment providers assume Chinese customers by default, one German manufacturer’s intake form reportedly asks for a Chinese registration number as standard.
Mesh plans to co-locate design and production, shortening feedback loops and driving down costs. The company’s near-term target is to manufacture 1,000 units per day within a year. That scale would position it to compete for bulk qualification cycles in 2027 and 2028.
Beyond data centres
For Mesh, data centres are only the first proving ground. The founders see optical wavelength communication as the next paradigm in connectivity across industries that depend on high-speed, high-efficiency data transfer.
If they succeed, the same expertise that once connected satellites in orbit could help reshape how information moves on Earth.
