Light-based internet project Taara is exiting Alphabet’s “moonshot” incubator X, spinning off into an independent company. Taara’s tech uses lasers to transmit data, and is envisaged as a rival to Elon Musk’s Starlink when it comes to connecting rural areas to the internet.

The Financial Times reports that Alphabet will retain a minority stake in Taara, which has also secured funding from Series X Capital. The company currently has two dozen employees and operates in 12 countries, working on everything from connecting the capital of the Democratic Republic of Congo to augmenting the congested network at the 2024 Coachella festival. 

“We’ve realised over time that for a good number of the things we create, there’s a lot of benefit to landing just outside of the Alphabet membrane,” said Eric “Astro” Teller, X’s so-called captain of moonshots. “They’re going to be able to get connected quickly to market capital, bring in strategic investors and generally be able to scale faster this way.”

Taara’s current tech involves firing a narrow beam of light from one traffic light-sized terminal to another, with transmission of up to 20 gigabits per second over 20km (almost 12.5 miles) distances. The terminals can be mounted on towers, and are quicker and cheaper to install than laying fiber — especially when you need a signal to reach an island, cross a river, or arrive at some otherwise hard-to-reach location. Last month the company announced that it has condensed its tech into a much more compact chip, which it expects to launch in a product in 2026.

While Taara’s tower-based optical technology works differently to Starlink’s satellites, it’s setting itself up as a rival in the business of connecting rural areas. “We can offer 10, if not 100 times more bandwidth to an end user than a typical Starlink antenna, and do it for a fraction of the cost,” founder Mahesh Krishnaswamy told Wired.

Taara itself has its origins in another X project, Loon, which imagined distributing data by shooting lasers around a network of 20-mile-high balloons. Believe it or not, that proved unfeasible in the end, and Loon was wound down in 2021 — just three years after it too “graduated” from Alphabet’s moonshot program. Loon’s lasers were repurposed into Taara’s towers by Krishnaswamy, though the tech also found a third home in Aalyria, another spin-off that focuses on coordinating satellite and airborne mesh networks, and has its own Tightbeam project that sounds similar to Taara.