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SpaceX vets raise $50M Series A for data center links

Travis Brashears, Cameron Robinson and Serena Grown-Haeberli began collaborating at SpaceX, developing optical communications links that keep thousands of Starlink internet satellites in constant contact. 

Now, the three engineers are co-founders of Mesh Optical Technologies, a Los Angeles startup that announced a $50 million Series A led by Thrive Capital on Tuesday. 

Mesh aims to mass-produce optical transceivers, devices that convert optical signals from fiber or laser into electrical signals for computers. CEO Brashears, President Robinson, and VP of Product Grown-Haeberli realized the opportunity when designing a new generation of compute-hungry SpaceX satellites forced them to assess the optical transceiver market, and they saw its limitations.

Optical transceivers are particularly important for data centers aimed at training and operating large deep learning models, because they allow multiple GPUs to work in concert. One established U.S. supplier, AOI, won a contract worth $4 billion to provide components for AWS data centers last year.

“Someone will brag about a million GPU cluster; you have to multiply by four to five for the number of transceivers in that cluster,” Brashears explained. 

The company’s goal is to manufacture a thousand units per day within the year so they can begin qualifying for bulk orders in 2027 and 2028.   

The optical transceiver market is dominated by Chinese firms and suppliers, and Mesh sees an advantage in building its supply chain outside of that country. While trade restrictions haven’t impacted the market yet, the founders and their backers see themselves as getting in front of a national security dilemma. 

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“If AI is the most important technology in several generations (which we believe to be true), to have critical parts of AI data center capex run through misaligned/competitive countries is a problem,” Thrive Partner Philip Clark wrote TechCrunch. “In the immediate term, Mesh is solving our need for better ways to do interconnect if we want to keep scaling AI.”

The challenge for Mesh, the founders say, is executing lights-out, automated manufacturing techniques, which aren’t common in U.S. industry. So much of this expertise is concentrated in China that even European equipment suppliers expect Chinese customers — one German firm’s standard intake form asks for a Chinese company registration number.

By co-locating design and production, the founders hope to realize more efficient and lower-cost components. Their current design removes one commonly used but power-hungry component, which Robinson said could reduce GPU cluster power usage by 3% to 5%, a meaningful amount as hyperscalers seek to wring as much efficiency out of their systems as possible. 

Data centers are just the beginning of Mesh’s aspirations; the company sees optical wavelength communications as the next paradigm in communications.

“The world has primarily focused on [radio frequencies] for a long time,” Brashears told TechCrunch. “We want to be at the precipice of transition from RF to photonics…we want to interconnect everything, and not just computers, but that’s where we’re starting.”

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Snapchat launches creator subscriptions in the US

Social network Snapchat announced today it’s launching creator subscriptions in alpha with select people in the U.S. starting on February 23. The company noted that users will be able to buy subscriptions to creators, including Jeremiah BrownHarry Jowsey, and Skai Jackson. This will allow users to unlock exclusive content while creating monetization opportunities for creators.

Creators can set their own monthly prices for subscription within the app, while Snap will recommend different tiers to them. The subscription will unlock subscriber-only content, priority replies to a creator’s public Stories, and ad-free consumption for that creator’s Stories.

Snap noted that this is a new way for creators to earn more money besides the existing programs.

“Expanding on existing monetization offerings like the Unified Monetization Program and the Snap Star Collab Studio, Creator Subscriptions introduce a premium layer of connection directly into how Snapchatters already engage with creators across Stories, Chat, and replies,” the company said in the blog post.

Snapchat reached 946 million daily active users, according to the company’s Q4 2025 results. The platform noted during its earnings that the number of U.S.-based users posting to Spotlight grew over 47% year-over-year. The company also spun out hardware to a new entity called Specs last month.

The company added that it plans to expand the program to Snap Stars in Canada, the U.K., and France in the coming weeks.

Rival company Meta also allows creators to offer subscriptions on platforms like Instagram and Facebook, which gives users access to exclusive content and badges.

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Mistral AI buys Koyeb in first acquisition to back its cloud ambitions

Mistral AI, the French company last valued at $13.8 billion, has made its first acquisition. The OpenAI competitor has agreed to buy Koyeb, a Paris-based startup that simplifies AI app deployment at scale and manages the infrastructure behind it.

Mistral has been primarily known for developing large language models (LLMs), but this deal confirms its ambitions to position itself as a full-stack player. In June 2025, it had announced Mistral Compute, an AI cloud infrastructure offering which it now hopes Koyeb will accelerate.

Founded in 2020 by three former employees of French cloud provider Scaleway, Koyeb aimed to help developers process data without worrying about server infrastructure — a concept known as serverless. This approach gained relevance as AI grew more demanding, also inspiring the recent launch of Koyeb Sandboxes, which provide isolated environments to deploy AI agents.

Before the acquisition, Koyeb’s platform already helped users deploy models from Mistral and others. In a blog post, Koyeb said its platform will continue operating. But its team and technology will now also help Mistral deploy models directly on clients’ own hardware (on premises), optimize its use of GPUs, and help scale AI inference — the process of running a trained AI model to generate responses — according to a press release from Mistral.

As part of the deal, Koyeb’s 13 employees and its three co-founders, Yann Léger, Edouard Bonlieu, and Bastien Chatelard (pictured above in 2020), are set to join the engineering team of Mistral, overseen by CTO and co-founder Timothée Lacroix. Under his leadership, Koyeb expects its platform to transition into a “core component” of Mistral Compute over the coming months.

“Koyeb’s product and expertise will accelerate our development on the Compute front, and contribute to building a true AI cloud,” Lacroix wrote in a statement. Mistral has been ramping up its cloud ambitions. Just a few days ago, the company announced a $1.4 billion investment in data centers in Sweden amid growing demand for alternatives to U.S. infrastructure.

Koyeb had raised $8.6 million to date, including a $1.6 million pre-seed round in 2020, followed in 2023 by a $7 million seed round led by Paris-based VC firm Serena, whose principal Floriane de Maupeou celebrated the acquisition. For the firm, this combination will play a key role “in building the foundations of sovereign AI infrastructure in Europe,” she told TechCrunch.

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In part thanks to these geopolitical tailwinds, but also due to its focus on helping enterprises unlock value from AI, Mistral recently passed the milestone of $400 million in annual recurring revenue. Koyeb, too, will be focused on enterprise clients going forward, and new users will no longer be able to sign up for its Starter tier. 

Mistral didn’t disclose financial terms of the deal, and it is unknown whether other acquisitions are in the works. But speaking at Stockholm’s Techarena conference last week, CEO Arthur Mensch said Mistral is hiring for infrastructure and other roles, pitching the company to prospective employees as an organization that is “headquartered in Europe, that is doing frontier research in Europe.”

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Anthropic releases Sonnet 4.6

Anthropic has released a new version of its midsized Sonnet model, keeping pace with the company’s four-month update cycle. In a post announcing the new model, Anthropic emphasized improvements in coding, instruction-following, and computer use.

Sonnet 4.6 will be the default model for Free and Pro plan users.

The beta release of Sonnet 4.6 will include a context window of 1 million tokens, twice the size of the largest window previously available for Sonnet. Anthropic described the new context window as “enough to hold entire codebases, lengthy contracts, or dozens of research papers in a single request.”

The release comes just two weeks after the launch of Opus 4.6, with an updated Haiku model likely to follow in the coming weeks.

The launch comes with a new set of record benchmark scores, including OS World for computer use and SWE-Bench for software engineering. But perhaps the most impressive is its 60.4% score on ARC-AGI-2, meant to measure skills specific to human intelligence. The score puts Sonnet 4.6 above most comparable models, although it still trails models like Opus 4.6, Gemini 3 Deep Think, and one refined version of GPT 5.2.

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