DATA TRANSPORT. olee.space Co-founders Suman Hiremath,
COO, and (R) James Solomon, CEO
When James Solomon began thinking seriously about wireless communication beyond radio spectrum in 2017, India’s telecom industry was undergoing a brutal consolidation.
Reliance Jio’s price war was reshaping the market, legacy operators were under strain, and Vodafone and Idea announced a merger in a bid to survive mounting debt and shrinking margins. Spectrum auctions were becoming more and more expensive, even as the limits of terrestrial fibre networks were difficult to ignore.
Meanwhile, global players were quietly laying the groundwork for satellite constellations, betting that future data demand would outgrow both underground cables and conventional wireless networks.
Solomon, then a materials science student at IIT-Bombay, noticed a structural gap that few in India were addressing: while data consumption was exploding, the medium carrying it — spectrum — was finite, regulated and increasingly congested.
“That mismatch pushed me to think about what comes after spectrum,” he says.
It led to olee.space — a startup co-founded in Pune by Solomon, Suman Hiremath, Kalarani Kumar, Saarthak Mittal, and Sunder Nookala — which builds laser-based optical communication systems
Free of congestion
olee.space (olee means light) uses infrared laser beams to transmit data wirelessly at speeds comparable to fibre-optic cables. Unlike radio-frequency communication, laser links are highly directional, difficult to intercept and immune to spectrum congestion.
There was one hitch, however. “Holding a laser steady over long distances is incredibly hard,” Solomon explains. Even a minor vibration can cause a laser beam to drift by hundreds of metres over a 10–20 km range. In space, the complexity multiplies: satellites travel at nearly 27,000 km per hour, while links must remain aligned across thousands of kilometres.
The tech
olee.space says its proprietary hardware and control systems have resolved this issue. Its commercial ground-based systems currently support 20-km links with data rates of up to 10 Gbps. The company manufactures the core in-house.
Solomon says, “If you don’t control the hardware, you don’t control the outcome.”
Optical communication fell into a grey licensing area in India, neither permitted nor prohibited, delaying commercial rollouts. olee.space decided to first pursue international markets and defence applications, where optical links remain largely unregulated and demand for secure communication is acute.
The money
The company has raised about $2 million funding to date and invoiced ₹30–40 lakh, with confirmed orders worth over ₹2.5 crore in the pipeline.
The future
While terrestrial telecom deployments may taper over the next two years, Solomon believes the real opportunity lies in satellite networks, defence systems, and drone-based infrastructure.
olee.space is eyeing business in the US, Southeast Asia, and West Asia, where there is growing demand for high-bandwidth wireless links.
In a world running out of spectrum, olee.space shines a new light.
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Published on January 19, 2026