- Taara recently graduated from Google’s X Moonshot Factory
- Its technology is built around narrow, invisible light beams to transmit high-speed data through the air
- During its incubation period, Taara helped T-Mobile serve crowds at festivals by supplying high-capacity backhaul
From chasing Loon balloons in far-off places to outsmarting monkeys in India, Taara’s founders have seen it all. Even shark-shaped slippers.
Now the wireless optical communications vendor is celebrating its graduation from Google’s X, The Moonshot Factory, with an unspecified amount of financing from Series X Capital. That means Taara is no longer a bet within X but an independent company with a mission to help solve the world’s connectivity problems.
Earlier this month at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, the company unveiled its next-generation Taara chip, which uses invisible light beams to transmit high-speed data through the air. Whereas its first-generation technology, known as the Taara Lightbridge, steers light using a system of mirrors, sensors and hardware, this new chip uses software to steer and track light beams without those pesky moving parts.
Basically, what they’ve done is taken most of the core functionality of the Taara Lightbridge, which is about the size of a traffic light, and shrunk it down to the size of a fingernail, explained Taara founder and CEO Mahesh Krishnaswamy.
“What Taara is actually focused on is using that same light frequency that's inside fiber, but doing it in a wireless way. It's bringing the best of both worlds, where you get the speeds of fiber, but with all the flexibility of wireless, so you're able to provide very high-speed, fiber-like bandwidth, but over the air,” he told Fierce.
The new chip is a big leap forward, but the chip itself is pointless unless they put it into a smaller form factor.
“As we get closer and closer and things become even smaller and smaller, we will be able to get it into devices. We will be able to get into light fixtures. We'll be able to get it into much smaller form factor,” he said.
Taara expects its new chip will be available for its next product launch in 2026.
Taara’s backhaul for telecom operators
Taara's existing technology already has been deployed by operators in more than a dozen countries. Vodafone, Bharti Airtel and T-Mobile US are among its telco partners.
T-Mobile used Taara’s technology for high-capacity backhaul during two large outdoor events. At the Albuquerque Balloon Festival, a Taara terminal was installed at a fiber access point two kilometers away from the festival grounds and aligned with a second terminal at a T-Mobile cell on wheels (COW) stationed closer to the event. For last year’s Coachella, T-Mobile put a Taara terminal on a cell tower designed to look like a palm tree, which then connected to another terminal on a T-Mobile COW.
Using light in lieu of RF is not a new idea (Li-Fi is a previous example). Taara has refined its technology over roughly seven years, starting when it was a concept within the Moonshot Factory, the same place that developed Project Loon, the initiative that tried to use giant balloons to provide connectivity from the stratosphere.
Loon ultimately shut down, but many lessons were learned, some which live on via Taara. Krishnaswamy was the one who suggested that engineers use fluffy socks instead of shoes when they walked on the Loon balloons to prevent pinholes while they were being built. That evolved into something even cooler: shark slippers, which are currently on exhibit at the Moonshot factory in Mountain View, California.
It was at Loon where Krishnaswamy first learned about the technology at the heart of what’s now Taara. Balloons, which were bobbing and weaving in the stratosphere, needed to be connected with very high-speed data. Later, that technology became part of Taara, where they “brought it back down to the ground,” he said.
“It's a very simple, elegant solution, but we call it moonshot compost, where we take ideas from the moonshots, but then you recycle them without losing the core problem that we're trying to solve,” he said. “We have a saying here at X, which is, ‘fall in love with the problem.’ So if our mission was to provide connectivity in an abundant and affordable way, we found that this may be a simpler and elegant solution, and we've now taken this technology and deployed it.”
Not monkeying around: Breakthroughs in FSO
As part of that deployment phase, Krishnaswamy and his colleagues experienced their fair share of adventures, which he talks all about in a recent podcast with Alphabet’s Captain of Moonshots Astro Teller. The talk explains an encounter with some “very territorial” monkeys during a deployment in India.
As Krishnaswamy tells it, the monkeys were messing with the attenuation of the gear, so Taara developed a way to automatically adjust the equipment so even as the monkeys were jumping and swaying, the beam remained locked and available to send data.
So far, Taara’s deployments have not been high in volume, but that is likely to change as Taara introduces new equipment like the chipset, which means smaller form factors and lower costs, according to Shiv Putcha, director, Research and Consulting at GSMA Intelligence.
“Taara has hit some major milestones and by commercializing their services, has done a lot to reverse the previous challenges that held back free space optics (FSO). I believe that is a big achievement,” Putcha told Fierce via email. “But now with the new chipset announcement, that has massive potential to fundamentally change the economics of transport for operators globally. Their roadmap also includes new technologies like beam steering, which could resolve the current line-of-sight requirement, which would have big implications for operators and help them achieve full coverage cost effectively around the country.”
At the speed of light: Sign of things to come
Krishnaswamy has big plans for Taara’s next phase. That includes doubling down on countries where it’s already operating and expanding into new markets. It will also be refining its business models, which involve simply selling the product or doing a bandwidth-as-a-service model, where it can lease the amount of capacity that’s needed and grow with the customers as they go along.
“We are innovating on the business front. We are innovating on the geography and the operational side of things, and we are innovating on the technological front between derivatives of the product,” he said.
Graduating from the Moonshot Factor is a positive sign. “That’s a really good, strong signal for us to tell the world that this is very likely to succeed and that’s why we’re ready to go on the outside,” he said. “The ones that end up making it out are the ones who are more successful, the ones they deem ready for the outside world.”