Introducing the Light Generation
Taara is spinning out of X to become an independent company with a mission to bring high-speed, affordable and abundant connectivity to people everywhere using beams of light.
Today, we’re announcing that the Taara team is graduating from The Moonshot Factory to become an independent company. We’ve 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 I shared in today’s 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, our 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 us closer to overcoming the stubborn connectivity gaps that prevent nearly 3 billion people from accessing the internet.
Episode 2 of The Moonshot Podcast, "Essential Connections" looks at X’s mission to find radical new ways to connect the unconnected—starting with Loon balloons and evolving into Taara’s light-beamed internet.
My passion for connectivity was sparked while I was applying for universities in the U.S. from an internet cafe in Chennai. 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 radio frequency to fill the gap. However, traditional radio frequency 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 kilometers. 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.
A Taara chip prototype
Chasing light as far as it will go
Thank you to our partners across the industry who have been with us on this journey every step of the way. Taara has already deployed hundreds of links in more than a dozen countries. We’re 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. We’re also working with innovators and researchers to explore new applications for our recently launched silicon photonic chip which uses light to transmit high-speed data through the air.
And we are just getting started. We’re continuing to look for like-minded partners to join us on this journey. If you’re an internet service provider, network operator, innovator or researcher who shares our mission to expand access to fast, affordable and abundant connectivity, please get in touch. You can find our team over at Taara Connect.