SpaceX vets raise $50M Series A for data center links

Travis Brashears, Cameron Ramos, and Serena Grown-Haeberli first worked together at SpaceX, where they developed optical communications links that keep thousands of Starlink internet satellites continuously connected.

Now the trio has brought that experience to a new venture. They are the co-founders of Mesh Optical Technologies, a Los Angeles-based startup that announced a $50 million Series A round on Tuesday, led by Thrive Capital.

Mesh is focused on mass-producing optical transceivers — hardware that converts optical signals from fibre or laser into electrical signals that computers can process. CEO Brashears, President Ramos, and VP of Product Grown-Haeberli say they saw the opening while designing a new generation of compute-intensive SpaceX satellites, which pushed them to evaluate the optical transceiver market and confront what they viewed as major limitations in existing offerings.

Optical transceivers have become especially critical for data centres used to train and run large deep learning models, as they enable multiple GPUs to operate as a single system. One established U.S. supplier, AOI, secured a $4 billion contract last year to provide components for AWS data centres.

“Someone will brag about a million GPU cluster; you have to multiply by four to five for the number of transceivers in that cluster,” Brashears said.

Mesh’s immediate target is scale. The company wants to reach production of roughly 1,000 units per day within the next year, so it can begin qualifying for bulk procurement cycles expected in 2027 and 2028.

Chinese firms and suppliers currently dominate the optical transceiver market, and Mesh believes it can benefit from expanding its supply chain beyond China. While trade restrictions have not yet significantly disrupted the market, the founders and their investors argue that the industry is heading toward a national security question.

“If AI is the most important technology in several generations (which we believe to be true), to have critical parts of AI data centre capex run through misaligned/competitive countries is a problem,” Thrive partner Philip Clark wrote. “In the immediate term, Mesh is solving our need for better ways to interconnect if we want to keep scaling AI.”

Execution will be the hard part, the founders say. Mesh is betting on lights-out, highly automated manufacturing methods — approaches that remain uncommon in much of U.S. industry. A significant share of the expertise sits in China to such an extent that even European equipment suppliers often expect Chinese customers; one German company’s standard intake form reportedly requests a Chinese company registration number.

By keeping design and production close together, the founders say they can build more efficient components at a lower cost. Their current design removes a commonly used but power-hungry component, which Ramos said could cut power usage in GPU clusters by 3% to 5% — a meaningful gain as hyperscalers try to squeeze out every possible efficiency improvement.

Data centres, however, are only the first step in Mesh’s plans. The company believes optical wavelength communications could become the next major communications paradigm.

“The world has primarily focused on [radio frequencies] for a long time,” Brashears said. “We want to be at the precipice of transition from RF to photonics…we want to interconnect everything, and not just computers, but that’s where we’re starting.”