It's Light That Does The Talking: How Olee Cracks The Optical Code

When God said, ‘Let there be light’, little did the baby world know that some 4.5 Bn years later, a young, only 300,000-year-old species would some day go beyond the day and night as God had marked, and use it for something entirely different – communications.

Ancient Greece, the cradle of modern-day human civilisation, was first to use light for communications. That’s where the seeds of advanced optical communication germinated. From heliographs in ancient Greece to photophones in the eighteenth century to modern-day laser technology – the use of light in communications evolved over the ages.

Advanced scientific research and wider applications have revolutionised terrestrial and satellite telecommunications, creating room for Free Space Optical Communication (FSOC) that enables high-speed connectivity in space and on ground. As an advanced substitute to radio frequency (RF), it uses light through free space – air, outer space, and vacuum – to transmit data or messages wirelessly.

As India makes great strides in communications, Pune-based Olee.space aims to rule the FSOC landscape on the evolving home turf, where private LTE networks, widespread adoption of IoT, need for last-mile connectivity, and advancement in satellite-to-ground communications have spawned a $0.55 Mn market for FSOC that’s pegged at $1.9 Bn around 2030.

Olee’s FSOC hardware box sits on telecom towers. They ensure efficient connectivity. “There were 17 companies globally working on this technology, but most of them have either shut down or the founders exited following acquisitions,” said James Solomon, cofounder and CEO of Olee.

The US and Canada rule the $1.15-2 Bn market for Free Space Optics, with companies such as AIRLINX Communications, L3 Harris, Collinear Networks (acquired), SA Photonics (acquired), Alphabet (project Taara) working on it, along with companies like CableFree and Mynaric in the UK and Germany.

Olee got the whiff of business prospect in India’s booming telecom sector.

It Was A Lightbulb Moment

Olee – adapted from oli, which means light in Tamil – believes it can revolutionise sectors like defence, civilian terrestrial telecommunications, and spacetech, with its photonic tech, while also reducing the carbon footprint.

James Solomon and Suman Hiremath founded the startup in 2020, but the seed of the idea was planted back in 2017, when Solomon was studying material sciences. During his undergrads, he started working with the DRDO labs and built a few products for defence applications.

The young engineer realised that there was a gap, particularly in defence and space spectrum networks, because they leveraged radio frequency (RF). “Because of high security parameters involved here, latency was a major issue with RF, which would also affect signal quality,” he said.

This is when he began early research on high-bandwidth, low-latency optical communication systems. Solomon created a 90-metre terrestrial FSOC communication system in 2019.

Olee came up after Solomon met Hiremath, driven by the common inspiration from Laser Communications Relay Demonstration (LCRD), which NASA was working on. It used two optical modules to generate infrared lasers to transmit data to and from the earth.

As their research matured, the Olee team realised that they were looking at a major market opportunity – not just in defence but even in terrestrial communications.

Freedom To Go Beyond The Spectrum

In a world depending heavily on radio frequency-based communications, free space optics offered room for the exponential growth in telecommunications.

“The problem with RF-based communication systems is that we are bound by spectra that are strictly regulated, besides geopolitical and governance issues, but then the bandwidth capacity is increasing every year,” Solomon pointed out.

With every leap in cellular technology – from 2G to 3G to 4G to 5G and to upcoming 6G – network bandwidth increases nearly fourfold, to give space to faster data transfer. But, there’s a trade-off. As bandwidth increases, the distance radio waves can travel reduces by about half.

In simple terms, higher-frequency waves carry more data but cover shorter ranges.

This is why every new-generation mobile network requires a denser grid of cell towers to maintain seamless coverage. While this ensures better connectivity for users, it also brings ecological concerns with more energy consumption and land acquisition, besides civic challenges.

“Light gives us this freedom to work outside the spectrum,” summed up Solomon.

The Guiding Light In Business

If so many companies around the world have shut shops, what convinced Olee to venture in this domain?

“We visited all the countries that were working with this technology to understand what they were building, what went wrong, so that we could build it differently,” Solomon said. “We tried to learn from the reasons that had felled so many companies.”

Olee uses the FSOC technology to help telecom towers gain access to a wider bandwidth and better network coverage even when they are far apart. “While the existing broadband networks like Jio and others can provide the highest internet speed of 100 Mbps or a maximum of 1 Gbps, we have achieved about 100 Gbps in 1 km.”

Olee’s FSOC product, a box-like structure, is placed on the telecom tower. The hardware comprises lenses, lasers, network components, chips, and other accessories.

The startup runs on a B2B business model which serves the middle mile in telecommunications. It caters to companies in telecom and data centre businesses in India and in countries like Indonesia, Singapore, and Vietnam. Olee claims to earn around 20% of its revenue from defence use cases from land-to-drone communications.

The Olee founder refused to divulge its financials beyond stating that 70% of its revenue in FY25 came from overseas customers. It sells in the international market through its Indian customers. Its regulatory filings with the Ministry of Corporate Affairs (MCA) revealed that it did not have an operating revenue in FY24 and Olee is yet to file its financials for FY25.

The startup recently raised $3 Mn in its seed funding round from Rockstud Capital and others to expand its technology capabilities in spacetech and defence. In India, Olee competes with Astrogate Labs in the spacetech sector.

Olee’s FSOC technology is designed for communication across five key domains: static to static and static to moving objects in terrestrial, moving to moving objects that are also terrestrial, and then terrestrial to drones and terrestrial to high-altitude, terrestrial to space, space to space, and space to deep space.

On The Trail Of Light

After setting up its business largely in civilian terrestrial communication, the company is now aiming to enter spacetech by the end of this year.

Olee has started working on lab tests with In-SPACE and other regulatory agencies as it gears up for its spacetech pilot. Solomon said the startup is in talks with its potential satcom clients in India and abroad, who are readying their satellite launches.

Olee sees prospects in the oil industry, where RF-based mobile networks cause fire, and railway networks in remote areas, where its optical communication promises enhanced coverage across applications.

On the defence front, Olee helps the armed forces evade radio jammers. But now it is also working on directed energy weapon (DEW) platforms that can soft-kill target assets using the power of light.

While the company doesn’t have many Indian competitors in the civilian terrestrial application, it will have to compete with the likes of Paras Defence, Tonbo Imaging, and a few government agencies in the DEW space.

In the next 12 months, Olee plans to enter the US market as a vendor partner. While this technology has witnessed multiple failures globally, its investor Rockstud Capital bets on the fact that the startup has gathered interest from top enterprises.

Without disclosing the names of these companies, Bhairavi Nagda, managing partner at Rockstud, said that Olee has the letter of interest (LOI) and strategic partnerships with some global players in aviation, telecom, optical communication, and other fields, which work as a clear validation.

Solomon is also the co-chair of the startup and MSME committee at the Broadband India Forum, while Hiremath is a member of this panel. “The founders’ pedigree matters,” said the investor.

With another $10 Mn funding round in the pipeline, it will be interesting to see if Olee could spread its light on the communication landscape and script a success story in a sector replete with failures.

[Edited By Kumar Chatterjee]

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