This 36-year-old sci-fi ‘nerd’ quit his banking job to start a deep space startup that has raised $24 million

Rohit Jha, 36, is the co-founder and CEO of Transcelestial.

Courtesy of Rohit Jha

Rohit Jha calls himself a “huge nerd.”

He developed a deep love for computers, space and ultimately science fiction in his early years.

Jha spent much of his childhood and adolescence coding games on a secondhand computer, star-gazing through a telescope on his school’s rooftop and reading the work of science-fiction writer Isaac Asimov.

Today, the 36-year-old is the co-founder and CEO of Transcelestial, a deep space and communications technology startup that aims to make the internet more accessible by developing and deploying a network of lasers between cell towers, street-level poles and more, creating a fiber-like communications network.

Rohit Jha with members of the Transcelestial team.

Courtesy of Rohit Jha

Jha grew up in Jamshedpur, a small city that has since become a major industrial center in India.

While in high school, Jha was chosen to take part in the highly selective National Physics Olympiad program, which exposed him to more advanced concepts like general relativity, string theory and quantum mechanics.

After high school, he moved to Singapore to attend the Nanyang Technological University on scholarship, where he studied electrical and electronic engineering. During that time, Jha says he worked on several major projects, including Singapore’s first space program, as well as the country’s first indigenous satellite.

It was throughout his high school and university days that Jha’s love for science fiction and space engineering kicked into high gear.

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 that I finally realized why the internet sucked,” he said. “As part of my role in electronic trading, you’re really looking at optimizing latency between world’s trading centers. It’s a big thing how fast you can go from New York to Chicago, Chicago to London … and who has the fastest latencies.”

He discovered that most of the world’s internet comes from a vast network of fiber optic cables that are laid across the ocean floor, which bring data between continents globally. These undersea cables can cost billions of dollars to lay, and often create bottlenecks and break as a result of ocean activity, he said.

Notably, because the process of getting internet to people can be so costly, the companies responsible for bringing connectivity to the hands of the people are often motivated to “only invest in those cities where they have a high enough chance of ROI,” he said.

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

“There’s never going to be a future where the internet never exists unless we are wiped out … and data will always grow,” which means that the divide between the haves and have nots will also continue to widen, unless there is a sea change in how the internet is provided, he said.

Several years into the job, Jha realized that banking wasn’t for him.

“I was lucky, because it was the hand-picked team in the entire company, and some of the best people I’ve ever worked with in my life — very impressive people — but … there were many times that I felt like a cog in the whole organization,” he said.

In addition, after growing up with a love for sci-fi, he said it painted a “utopia” of sorts — “a world where I was sure that by the time I grew up, we would have transportation to moon and Mars.”

“I realized that we are continuing to live in a world where we have been promised a future [that was] not delivered, and that was just super frustrating, and I just didn’t want to continue living in that,” he said.

Jha finally decided to leave after coming to a realization: “You have one life, and [I’d] rather work on things where [I’m] sitting at the edge of the unknown.” So in 2015, he quit his job, took a year off to travel, and started 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.

“On day one, I met Danesh and he was exactly the person I needed,” Jha said. “So we went to an [Indian restaurant]and we had an early biryani meal, we kept discussing, we had a second biryani meal, kept discussing, and then eventually it was clear that we wanted to start this company together.”

Transcelestial was founded in 2016 by co-founders Rohit Jha and Mohammad Danesh.

Courtesy of Rohit Jha

After much discussion, they aimed to create “the biggest telecom company in space that’s possible for the next few decades,” Jha said. They decided that the best way to do so would be through lasers.

“Lasers have the capacity 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 have done is we have … taken that laser from inside a fiber and we run it wirelessly.”

“This means that it gets the speed of fiber, but the price economics and the speed of deployment of wireless technologies. We can dramatically reduce years and months, to days and weeks when setting up internet for not only a home, but even a village or a town,” said Jha.

Transcelestial’s Centauri provides wireless laser communications.

Courtesy of Rohit Jha

In 2024, the company deployed its lasers at the Coachella and Stagecoach music festivals through its shoebox-sized device called Centauri, providing enhanced internet access for T-Mobile users who attended the festivals, according to a company statement.

Beyond their terrestrial telecommunications business, Transcelestial has its sights set on a bigger target — space.

The company aims to develop a “constellation of small satellites positioned in low earth orbit, allowing [its] laser network to not only beam across cities but upwards to connect continents globally,” according to a company statement.

“What we can do is effectively drop a fiber cable from orbit using lasers. So instead of the cable, it will be a laser coming down into a city, and that will become the backbone for the entire city,” said Jha.

Jha and his team are ultimately looking to build the next frontier.

“As humanity expands, we need communication and high speed connectivity in deep space,” he said. Transcelestial is working on “expanding in deep space and building the infrastructure that’s needed … for automation as well as maybe even human settlement in the next couple of decades.”

Want to make extra money outside of your day job?Sign up for CNBC’s online courseHow to Earn Passive Income Onlineto learn about common passive income streams, tips to get started and real-life success stories.

Plus,sign up for CNBC Make It’s newsletterto get tips and tricks for success at work, with money and in life.