Taara, an Internet project based on laser communications, is about to exit Alphabet's "Moonshot" incubator X and spin off into an independent company. Taara's technology uses lasers to transmit data and is expected to compete with Elon Musk's Starlink in connecting rural areas.
Alphabet will retain a minority stake in Taara, which also received funding from SeriesX Capital, the Financial Times reported. The company now has more than 20 employees and operates in 12 countries with a wide range of operations, from connecting the capital of the Democratic Republic of Congo to expanding its congested network for the 2024 Coachella music festival.
“We realized over time that for a lot of the things we created, there would be a lot of benefit if they could live outside of Alphabet,” said Eric “Astro” Teller, captain of X’s so-called moonshot. “In this way, they will be able to quickly connect with market capital, bring in strategic investors, and generally be able to scale faster this way.”
Taara's current technology sends a narrow beam of light from one traffic light-sized terminal to another, with transmission speeds of up to 20Gbps and a range of up to 20 kilometers (nearly 12.5 miles). These terminals can be mounted on towers and are faster and cheaper to install than laying fiber - especially when signals are needed to reach islands, cross rivers or reach some hard-to-reach places. Last month, the company announced it had condensed its technology into a more compact chip, with a product expected to launch in 2026.
While Taara's tower optical technology works differently than Starlink's satellites, it has emerged as a competitor in connecting businesses in rural areas. "We can provide end users with 10 or even 100 times more bandwidth than a typical Starlink antenna at a fraction of the cost," founder Mahesh Krishnaswamy told Wired.
Taara itself grew out of another X project, Loon, which envisioned distributing data by firing lasers at a network of 20-mile-high balloons. This ultimately proved unfeasible, and the Loon trial was halted in 2021 — just three years after it "graduated" from Alphabet's moon landing program. Krishnaswamy repurposed Loon's lasers for Taara's towers, but the technology has also found a third home in Aalyria, another spin-off project focused on coordinating satellite and airborne mesh networks and has its own Tightbeam project, which sounds similar to Taara's.