As hyperscalers build out data centers around the world, they need to move the bits back and forth, and that often relies on a somewhat brittle network of undersea fiberoptic cables crisscrossing the oceans.

Those cables are tricky to access and repair, much less install. But alternatives aren’t easy to find: Radio transmissions don’t have the bandwidth, which rules out most wireless approaches on the ground or in orbit. But now, maybe lasers could do the job.

Endeavor Optical Networks, a start-up founded in May and emerging from stealth today with $10.75 million in seed funding from General Catalyst and Andreessen Horowitz, is betting on that plan. The co-founders, CEO Charlie Horowitz and CTO Tyler Presser, aim to launch a network of laser-equipped spacecraft to link data centers from orbit.

Most satellite communications networks, even those that provide broadband internet service, aren’t robust enough to carry data at 200 terabits a second or more, the speed of undersea fiber.

However, more powerful satellites and advances in optical technology are making space-to-ground communications with lasers more feasible. NASA used laser comms to beam back data from its most recent Moon mission, while a handful of private space companies, including York, Kepler, and Cailabs, have demonstrated links between Earth orbit and the ground.

Those connections, however, aimed for a throughput of 2.5 Gbps, and EON has a bigger starting goal, Horowitz says: Throughput of 2.4 terabits a second. That will require some secret sauce to deal with one of the biggest problems with laser comms—how the signal is distorted by the atmosphere as it passes through it, particularly when clouds are blocking the way.

EON intends to build a network of about 20 satellites, each able to provide a dedicated link between two continents, with the initial fleet providing 24 hour coverage for early customers. The company will carefully choose ground stations in different regions to serve local data centers and CDNs, using redundant sites and leveraging weather data to ensure a reliable link.

The startup is talking to hyperscalers and AI labs as customers, since they move more data than anyone else, with the focus on underserved or expensive routes: Lengthy ones, like France to Australia, or those without extensive existing infrastructure, like crossing between Africa and South America. They plan to sell dedicated capacity to entice customers interested in full control of their data transit.

First, though, EON will use its seed round to build out an optics lab, hire more engineers, and perform ground tests ahead of a demo satellite they hope to launch around the end of 2027. Horowitz expects that spacecraft to offer the highest optical downlink throughput yet seen—at least 800 gigs and perhaps a terabit.

Doing that will require careful engineering. EON will focus on producing the optical communications terminal, carefully allocating spending to the components that must be exquisite, like the gimbals that will point the laser. The company plans to buy powerful off-the-shelf satellite busses, like those made by Apex Space, Horowitz’s previous employer.

Horowitz served as Apex CEO Ian Cinnamon’s chief of staff and then as the company’s director of special projects. “Charlie is a force of nature—he can move seamlessly from strategy to the details required to make something real,” Cinnamon told TechCrunch. “Charlie is the ideal founder, and I invested personally because I believe deeply in Charlie and what he’s building at EON with Tyler.”

In addition to Pressler, a PhD astronautical engineer who has planned frontier missions for NASA, the company’s technical bench includes Michael David Francois, a long-time Google executive focused on global network infrastructure, and Wesley Baxter, an optics engineer who most recently worked on Amazon’s LEO satellite network.

Jeannette zu Fürstenburg, the General Catalyst partner who led the investment, said she sees it uniting the fund’s two key themes—AI and resilience.

“I don’t worry about demand,” she told TechCrunch. “I think all of that will solve for itself. It’s really all about can you actually get this thing into space in the time that we discussed? We really think about founder-product fit, [Horowitz] is just the right caliber of guy to go after a problem like this.”

They aren’t the only one chasing this problem—Blue Origin, Jeff Bezos’ space company, has announced plans for TeraWave, a 5,048 satellite network that aims to provide speeds of up to 6 Tbps to large-scale users. Blue’s plan is more ambitious, but will also require more time to launch and deploy. EON’s smaller fleet of satellites should be easier to get into space quickly, but they will need to solve many of the same technical challenges.

“Data centers have high standards for quality and redundancy,” points out Caleb Henry, the director of research at Quilty Space. “Satellite internet is just now progressing from a technology of last resort to dependable, high-bandwidth infrastructure. That’s not to say it will be impossible to make satellites optimized for data center connectivity, just that it will be harder and take longer than most entrepreneurs suggest.”

Still, a project like may be more practical compared to the popular idea of building the data centers themselves in space.

“We have one rule at the company: no physics problems,” Horowitz says. “There’s a market that exists today that we can go serve. Down the road, we’ll go and take on more as it comes, but we know that this is a problem that exists today, that’s only getting worse. That’s our bet—more data is moving terrestrially than ever.”

Palantir CEO Alex Karp on Monday once again warned that AI frontier labs are too untrustworthy for enterprises.

The CEO, who famously studied philosophy and earned a PhD in social theory, implied in Palantir’s quarterly shareholder letter that these were the kinds of capitalists who gave rise to Marxist socialism.

“There are Marxist overtones and undertones to our business,” he wrote in a letter to shareholders about Palantir’s outstanding quarter he wrote. “Others, including many of those building large language models, intend, knowingly or otherwise, to capture the means of production of their purported partners.”

To be clear, AI labs have hardly cornered Palantir out of the market. Quite the opposite. The skyrocketing use of AI helped Palantir achieve record-breaking results. For its second quarter, the company reported $1.9 billion in revenue, up 93% over the year-ago quarter, and $1.1 billion in profit, “more profit in a single quarter than we did in total revenue in the same period the year before,” he wrote.

During the quarterly conference call with Wall Street analysts, he explained his analogy further, relying heavily on a sort of “tech bro patriot” jargon common among defense tech companies. (Palantir’s senior leadership is entirely male.)

He asked on the call, if companies are going “to buy into a future” where your job helps your “adversaries win, and everybody who does win is a small, tiny group of people living in a tiny place that somehow believe because they eat vegetables and they don’t support war fighters that they deserve to have the total means of production of this country? And the rest of us should just sit by it back and absorb the cost of that revolution, which we’re paying for.”

Palantir, in contrast, serves model-agnostic AI and analysis software to governments and enterprises, and allows organizations to control their data as well as their AI “exhaust,” aka, their prompts, orchestration, context.

“How are we paying for it? In the enterprise context, people sign up for token self pleasurings… at real cost like other forms of self pleasure,” he said. “You are paying for the right for them to migrate your IP, your know-how, your expertise to their model, so that they can build a competitive business that doesn’t require your business or people. And why are they doing it? It’s actually being done for what they believe are moral reasons. They are superior to you. They deserve to colonize your enterprise.”

Jarring language aside, he is making an underlying point that is increasingly being repeated elsewhere, including from the likes of Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella.

This theory points to the significant list of companies that partnered or paid for Anthropic and OpenAI while the AI labs launched similar businesses ranging from design tools to, healthcare operations, legal, even drug discovery.

The truth is, none of these companies are economic villains or heroes — anymore than other for-profit companies are. AI is growing so quickly, the market changing so rapidly, there is clearly room for all, Palantir’s results show.

Snap CEO Evan Spiegel sidestepped investors’ questions about pre-order demand for the company’s long-awaited Specs smart glasses during Monday’s earnings call, just weeks before the device’s September launch event.

“What we’re hearing from folks is really that they want to try Specs,” Spiegel told investors. “It’s obviously a high consideration purchase at $2,195. Obviously, developers and folks who are familiar with the platform really understand it and understand the technical leaps we’ve made with with this generation. I think for the broader public and consumers, it’s going to be really important for folks to go hands-on. Our upcoming launch event will be an important sort of starting point for that consumer-oriented journey.”

The company unveiled Specs in June after spending more than a decade developing the device. The wearable’s $2,195 price tag is significantly higher than most Meta Ray-Ban smart glasses, which start at around $350, but lower than Apple’s Vision Pro, which starts at $3,500.

Investors also pressed Spiegel on why he believes Snap’s strategy is financially viable for a company of its size, why it chose to go it alone rather than partner with another company, and what gives him confidence that the company can compete with Apple, Meta, and Alphabet.

Spiegel responded that Snap believes the long-term opportunity to develop the next computing platform is “enormous.”

“I think what what some folks maybe don’t understand yet, especially because Specs are so new and we’re really the first mover in this this category, is how difficult the product is to to execute from a technical perspective,” Spiegel said. “When we started innovating in the social space, we were a late entrant. So, most of the the apps at the time, whether it was Facebook or Instagram or Twitter, were already in existence, and we had to really innovate to continue to grow. What’s so unique about this opportunity for us is really that we’re a first mover, and that really plays to our strengths as an innovator.”

When asked about product-market fit, Spiegel said it will likely be closer to the end of the decade before the company sees mass-market consumer adoption.

“I think things, for example, like weight and cost are going to have to come down to see you know unit volumes really meaningfully pick up.” But we do have, I think, a real advantage here in that developers have been building on the Specs platform now for several years.”