Forward Thinking Founders · 2025-11-17 · 29 min
In this episode of Forward Thinking Founders, Mat Sherman sits down with Gulmohar Ahluwalia, founder & CEO of Nyxara - a company building a next-generation space-to-ground communications system using cloud-piercing lasers capable of delivering terabits per second. Imagine downloading all of Netflix in five seconds. That’s the world Nyxara aims to unlock. Gulmohar walks through her path from aspiring astronaut to electrical engineer to telecom expert, and how seeing firsthand the limits of today’s 5G and RF-based networks pushed her toward free-space optical communication. She breaks down, in simple terms, why Starlink and other systems can’t get laser signals through clouds, why RF spectrum is physically tapped out, and why optical frequencies represent the next uncongested frontier for 6G-class internet. She then explains Nyxara’s core breakthrough: using an ultra-high-frequency ground laser to create a “hollow channel” through cloud and fog layers, allowing satellites to send and receive massive data loads reliably - effectively creating a portable, dynamic, distributed network layer in space.
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