Transcelestial is a wireless communications service provider headquartered in Singapore.The startup recently announced that it has raised a$10 millionLarge-scale A2 round of financing.
It is understood that this financing was led by Airbus Ventures, an investment arm of Airbus, and received participation from Kickstart Ventures, Genesis Alternative Ventures, Wavemaker, Cap Vista and SEEDS Capital. With this financing, Transcelestial’s total funding has reached $24 million.
Founded in 2016, Transcelestial is committed to lowering the barriers to deploying Internet services through wireless laser communication technology. As a background, according to reports, at this stage, Internet service access often needs to rely on underground cables or radio frequency base stations, but these two are usually difficult to popularize in remote surrounding areas due to high deployment costs and conditions. With a Transcelestial-based solution—a shoebox-sized laser communication device dubbed CENTAURI—the company can significantly reduce the cost per bit of deploying Internet services. And at present, it is reported that CENTAURI is the best ground communication solution in terms of low cost and high bandwidth among similar products.
Looking at the advantages of CENTAURI in specific aspects, taking a case during 2022 as an example, Transcelestial said that at that time, the company provided an emergency connection to a group of islands in Malaysia, enabling dozens of villages downstream to broadcast World Cup programs and Use its network for education, healthcare and financial transformation.
It is worth mentioning that recently, Transcelestial also proved in a demonstration at the University of Technology Sydney that its laser communication technology can achieve 10Gbps network transmission quality, which is enough to rival 5G networks.
For the follow-up development, Transcelestial stated that it hopes to expand the company’s existing market scale in Indonesia, India, Malaysia, Singapore, and the Philippines, and deploy CENTAURI in cooperation with telecom operators, ISPs, enterprises and other partners in these regions, so as to serve more Local users provide 4G and broadband (including home, business and campus) network services.
On the other hand, Transcelestial revealed that the company will also continue to expand its footprint in the US market, and plans to try to enter the local market by cooperating with local governments, enterprises, and telecom operators in the next year. Transcelestial said that at present, the company has cooperated with several ISPs in the West Coast area and a large cloud service and data center company.And as background to this move, there are datapointed outin the United States, 27% of the population in rural areas and 2% of the urban population lack ready-made Internet connection services.
In addition, Transcelestial pointed out that it will also use the funds to prepare for the production supply of the company’s CENTAURI manufacturing plant Terabit Factory in Singapore to cope with the supply chain disruptions that its peers are facing. It is understood that in terms of manufacturing CENTAURI equipment, the annual production capacity of the plant can reach 2,400 units.
And looking to the future,Transcelestialsaid the company is also working on bringing its laser communications technology into low Earth orbit (LEO), where it hopes to deploy its laser communication services directly to the required regions.
