BENGALURU, India / July 15, 2026 — QOSMIC has raised $3.33 million in seed funding co-led by Accel and Prosus, with participation from South Park Commons, ARTPARK, and angel investor Manish Jain, to build optical ground stations: the laser-based ground infrastructure that brings data down from the orbital economy.
The raise comes as the center of gravity in space shifts from sensing to computing. A new class of companies is moving data centers and AI processing into orbit, where satellites generate and analyze data at volumes radio links were never built to carry. Getting that data to Earth at terabit scale is now the binding constraint, and radio frequency, limited by spectrum, cannot meet it.
QOSMIC’s answer is the ground segment: optical ground stations that receive laser downlinks from satellites and orbital platforms. Just as fiber optics connected data centers on the ground, optical ground infrastructure will anchor the fabric linking data centers in orbit to Earth.
The market QOSMIC enters is consolidating around it. Over the past year, the largest independent suppliers of optical hardware have been absorbed into vertically integrated launch and constellation companies, including Rocket Lab’s acquisition of Mynaric and IonQ’s acquisition of Skyloom, leaving commercial operators to source critical infrastructure from companies that may also be their competitors. QOSMIC is built as neutral ground infrastructure: standards-interoperable and available to the full ecosystem of commercial operators, orbital data companies, and ground networks.
QOSMIC’s ground stations are built to receive optical downlinks at 10 gigabits per second, on a stack designed to scale to 100 Gbps, against the 1 to 2 Gbps ceiling of legacy radio links. At those rates, a single satellite pass can bring down hundreds of gigabytes rather than tens, at roughly one dollar per gigabyte versus the three to seventeen dollars commercial RF operators typically charge. Because an optical beam from low Earth orbit lands in a footprint about the size of a tennis court, the link is also difficult to intercept.
In under a year since founding, QOSMIC has field-validated its full optical chain of pointing, acquisition, tracking, and high-speed data transfer over a 10-kilometer terrestrial link, reaching Technology Readiness Level 6 (TRL6), and is preparing for its first in-orbit demonstration.
On the space side, QOSMIC is co-designing optical communication terminals with TakeMe2Space, an orbital data center company integrating the terminals into its MOI constellation. The two companies are also jointly developing optical inter-satellite link systems for low Earth orbit, with QOSMIC building the terminals and TakeMe2Space contributing high-precision gimbals, bus interconnects, and attitude control.
“As computing moves into orbit, every satellite and every orbital data center becomes a node that needs a high-capacity link to Earth, and optical is the only technology that scales to what is coming,” said Shreyaans Jain, Co-founder and CEO of QOSMIC. “We are architecting the ground layer as the Highway to the Cosmos, for everyone building in orbit.”
“Satellites are collecting more than they can ever send back to Earth, and most of what they see never makes it down. As computing moves into orbit, that gap only widens. QOSMIC is solving it with laser ground stations that are faster, more secure and far cheaper than today’s systems,” said Mahendran Balachandran and Pratik Agarwal, Partners at Accel.
The round funds delivery of operational ground stations to international customers, manufacturing and test scale-up, and engineering hiring. QOSMIC will be at the Small Satellite Conference in Salt Lake City, August 23-26. More at QOSMIC
ABOUT QOSMIC
QOSMIC builds optical ground station infrastructure for the orbital economy. Founded in 2025 by Shreyaans Jain, Rohit Ramakrishnan, and Aloke Kumar and incubated at ARTPARK, Indian Institute of Science (IISc), the company develops laser-based optical ground stations, and co-designs satellite optical terminals with partners, replacing radio-frequency bottlenecks with high-capacity connectivity between satellite constellations, orbital data centers, and Earth.
Media Contact: Shreyaans Jain, Founder and CEO / shrey@qosmic.space /Book a Ground Station
