How it all started

By JP Hansen, Co-founder and CEO

Everything that had a lasting impact on my life started in high school. This included finding the optics section in the back of my dad's physics textbook, and being so obsessed with understanding it that I carried the book around with me everywhere. I started building optical machines in late 2011 with the distant goal of eventually inventing something new, and contributing positively to my immediate community --then the world. The last ten years have been a journey through the realm of business, optics, and product design. Today, I am an inventor.

When I was a student at the University of Idaho, I split my time between three worlds. I was a psychology major, had a lab space in the physics building to study optical communications, and spent long nights reading about entrepreneurship in the Albertson business building. When a friend of mine from the business department was a few weeks away from graduating, I decided to design a machine to convince him to start a company with me. It was a desktop-sized optical contraption that could organize and combine network signals passively. I thought it would be an interesting toy, but didn’t realize that it had a ton of potential in the cloud industry until I described it to my dad a few days later.

I spent a full year trying to actually build the contents of the design myself while working as a cartoonist at the University’s newspaper. I was inspired by how the panels of a cartoon strip could fit together to create a single cohesive storyline, but could also be rearranged with no other modifications to create new, entirely different story lines.

Based on that design philosophy, I decided to build the Axon using small cartridges that are each individually responsible for one particular operation on a beam of light. They are designed to be rearranged and combined in different ways (like panels of a comic strip) to split, copy, encode or decode a network signal. By using a 3D printer, I was able to manufacture multiple prototypes over thanksgiving break, and by winter break, I had my first working, calibrated prototype. In my last semester of senior year, I registered all of my remaining courses online and returned to Seattle to manufacture as many Axons as I could, flesh out the business, and file a patent with Seed IP.

At a certain point, I realized to my horror that I had designed the Axon to work hand-in-hand with another device that I only assumed was commonplace in the industry (but never actually checked). I needed a compact, high-speed infrared data-streaming laser to make the Axon useful. Unfortunately, those simply are not available to consumers the way electronics components are. I would spend the remainder of 2019 trying to refurbish industrial grade optical transceivers (from 2004), haunting obscure electronics forums, and panic-building circuits to make ends meet.

In December of 2019, I finally nailed it. It turns out a “fiber launching” mechanism (which is common in university research labs but not data centers) can stream information at gigabit speeds by projecting and collimating the contents of a fiber optic cable as though it was a laser. After a few months of tweaking, I had one that could work at my wavelengths and desired distances. At that point, we could offer the installation of fiber launchers as a service, and integrate the Axon anywhere.