Singapore-headquartered wireless communications provider Transcelestial on Friday announced it has raised $10 million in a new funding round led by Airbus Ventures.
The company raised $7 million in equity funding and another $3 million from venture debt providers in the Series A2 round, its CEO and co-founder Rohit Jha told DealStreetAsia.
Existing investor Airbus Ventures contributed $3 million to the round, showed the company’s regulatory filings in Singapore. Kickstart Ventures put in $2.5 million, while the remaining $1.5 million was contributed by Genesis Alternative Ventures, SEEDS Capital, Cap Vista and return backers Wavemaker Partners and In-Q-Tel.
The latest round brings the total funds raised by Transcelestial to $24 million since its inception in December 2016. The company will use the fresh capital to ramp up its suite of solutions in South and Southeast Asia and the US.
The company seeks to make high-speed internet accessible to more people with an alternative to costly fibre optic networks.
“Fibre optics can be highly time-consuming and cost-prohibitive to deploy in most countries. It often faces huge ‘right of way’ challenges in getting access to the ground where it can be deployed. On a per kilometre basis, it can cost between $10,000 (in rural areas) to $100,000 (in dense urban areas),” Jha said.
Transcelestial believes wireless laser communication technology is the answer and has developed a device, called Centauri, to provide a wireless distribution network between buildings, traditional cell towers, street-level poles and other physical infrastructure.
The technology involves accurately beaming a laser as thin as a single hair strand into a smartphone-sized window located 3 km away. The cost of deploying this technology is around 10x cheaper at around $6,000 per km per gigabyte and takes just days for deployment, Jha said.
So far, Centauri devices have been installed in over ten markets, including Singapore, the US, Indonesia, India, Australia, New Zealand, Taiwan, the Philippines, Malaysia, and Mongolia. Customers include telecom companies, internet service providers, ports, universities, sports entertainment organisations, cloud providers, defence, and governments.
The company is now exploring collaborations with government, enterprise and telecommunications providers in the US.
According to DealStreetAsia’s DATA VANTAGE platform, Transcelestial reported revenue of $0.45 million in the financial year ended December 31, 2021, up 58% from the previous year. Its net loss jumped 33% during the period to $3.2 million.
Transcelestial primarily makes money from the sale of its Centauri devices. Without disclosing absolute numbers, Jha noted that device sales have been up 3-5 times on a year-on-year basis. The company is now exploring a charge-as-you-use model for its devices.