A team of former SpaceX engineers just closed a $50 million Series A to tackle one of AI's least sexy but most critical problems: getting data between chips fast enough. Mesh Optical Technologies is betting that optical transceivers - the hardware that connects servers inside massive AI data centers - will become the next infrastructure chokepoint as companies race to scale training clusters. While everyone fixates on GPUs and power grids, Mesh is building the pipes.
Mesh Optical Technologies just pulled in $50 million to solve a problem most people don't know exists. The Series A, led by Thrive Capital, funds the startup's mission to mass-produce optical transceivers - the unsung hardware that shuttles data between servers at light speed inside AI data centers.
The timing isn't accidental. As companies like OpenAI, Google, and Meta build ever-larger training clusters with tens of thousands of GPUs, the networking layer connecting those chips has become a serious bottleneck. You can have all the Nvidia Blackwell chips in the world, but if they can't talk to each other fast enough, your trillion-dollar AI bet grinds to a halt.
That's where Mesh comes in. Founded by veterans from SpaceX's Starlink satellite internet program, the company brings manufacturing expertise from building laser communications for space to the decidedly terrestrial problem of data center networking. According to TechCrunch, the team's background in high-volume production of optical systems gives them an edge in an industry still dominated by expensive, slow-to-ship components.
The market opportunity is massive. AI training runs require what's called high-bandwidth, low-latency networking - essentially, moving huge amounts of data between processors with near-zero delay. Traditional networking gear wasn't built for this. As model sizes explode and training clusters scale from hundreds to hundreds of thousands of GPUs, the demand for faster optical connections is outpacing supply. Industry analysts estimate the optical transceiver market for data centers will hit $15 billion by 2028, with AI infrastructure driving most of that growth.
