Endeavor Optical Network

Building space lasers

Endeavor Optical Networks (EON) is building a satellite system that beams data between continents using lasers instead of subsea fiber, emerging from stealth with $10.75 million in seed funding co-led by General Catalyst and Andreessen Horowitz. The company sells dedicated point-to-point capacity to hyperscalers, AI labs, and CDNs that need high-throughput intercontinental links without the multi-year timelines, cable ship logistics, and landing-station permitting that today's subsea routes require. The launch matters now because AI workloads are pushing traffic across oceans faster than new cables can be planted, and a string of recent subsea cable severings has made route diversity a real procurement concern. The architecture is straightforward in principle. The company plans to launch roughly 20 satellites that will beam data between continents at speeds approaching fiber, with an optical ground station lasing data up to a satellite that relays it in the same pass down to a paired station on another continent, no seabed involved. Endeavour Optical Networks wants to turn orbital lasers into backbone infrastructure , targeting long or underserved routes where existing cables are sparse or expensive. The co-founders are CEO Charlie Horowitz, previously chief of staff and director of special projects at Apex Space, and Tyler Presser, CTO and co-founder of EON, holds a PhD in astronautical engineering and planned frontier missions for NASA. The early technical team also includes Michael David Francois, a former Google network infrastructure executive, and Wesley Baxter, an optics engineer who worked on Amazon's Kuiper LEO network. The seed round also drew support from Main Object VC, XYZ VC, and Upfront Ventures, and will fund an optics lab, additional engineering hires, and ground testing ahead of a planned demo satellite.

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