Velmenni: Building Wireless Connectivity at the Speed of Light

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The next decade of connectivity won’t be won by peak speeds; it will be won by assured links: networks that can be deployed fast, stay up in real-world conditions, and remain resilient when the RF environment is congested, jammed, or simply not trusted.

That’s the gap Velmenni is going after with optical wireless using light (FSO + Li-Fi) to deliver high-capacity links without trenching fiber or fighting for spectrum. What makes this real is not the physics; it’s the engineering required to make optical links behave like infrastructure. Velmenni has been building toward that bar with institutional validation (including grants from Department of Telecommunications (DCIS, TTDF) and three grants from Ministry of Defence iDEX support for secure communications, particularly relevant to defence forces) and a product roadmap designed for the harsh environments where reliability is non-negotiable.

The pull is already global. Velmenni has executed multiple successful PoCs, 50+ live deployments, in India, the SEA region, and Tier-1 Mobile Network Operators in the US. The product is already certified by CE certification and will soon obtain FCC clearance.

The problem: rollout speed, reliability, and costs aren’t improving fast enough

Across telecom and enterprise infrastructure, the pressure is only rising as

• More data is moving across networks.
• Critical systems require greater uptime expectations.
• More sites need to be connected quickly, factories, campuses, towers, remote corridors, and dense urban pockets.

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Fiber remains the gold standard for performance, but in many deployments it’s also the slowest path to execution: civil work, permissions, time, and vulnerability to physical damage add friction. On the other hand, traditional wireless can be faster to deploy, but it’s increasingly forced to fight for consistent performance in crowded conditions.

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Velmenni’s Solution

Velmenni is building high-capacity backhaul and last-mile connectivity alternatives for 4G-LTE, 5G, and FTTx broadband networks, designed to deliver faster rollouts and lower total cost of ownership compared to fiber, licensed spectrum, and millimeter-wave options.

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Their core capability is optical wireless links: transmitting data via light across carefully engineered links. But what makes this difficult and valuable is building a system that holds up in the field: misalignment of links, low performance in inclement weather, link instability, and deployment challenges are where most approaches break.

Velmenni is targeting fiber-like throughput (10 Gbps+) on FSO links across distances of 1-25 km. It has deployed India’s first commercial carrier grade FSO backhaul links to enable a private 5G network at a GMR thermal power plant in Odisha, maintaining 99.999% availability for over 18 months in tropical weather conditions.

This is a company built with long-term engineering conviction. Deepak Solanki, Founder and CEO, has approached the problem with a product builder’s mindset: not just proving that optical wireless can work, but pushing it into deployment-grade performance. Velmenni’s systems are all-weather tested, designed and built in India, and intended to deliver seamless connectivity for Communication Service Providers (CSPs), Defence, and Enterprise customers, spanning dense urban telecom networks to tactical defence setups.

That combination of scientific rigor, systems thinking, and patience to ship real deployments is exactly what this demands.

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Why we invested

At pi Ventures, we get excited about deep-tech when it creates something that doesn’t merely “improve” the incumbent stack, but creates a 10x better outcome. Velmenni sits squarely in that category.

Optical wireless has been discussed for years, but it rarely crosses the chasm from “intriguing physics” to systems that networks can depend on. When we met Deepak and Velmenni’s team, we were convinced by the deployment-ready optical connectivity stack that is engineered around the realities operators and critical users care about - availability, repeatability, and operational simplicity, not just throughput.

Second, this is one of those wedges where the first market is not the last market. Optical wireless becomes most compelling wherever time-to-deploy, uptime, and security are immediate constraints which is why we expect defence and private 5G deployments to be strong early pull markets. These environments tend to have clearer ownership, faster execution loops, and less tolerance for performance variance. As Velmenni compounds field reliability and deployment repeatability, the same core capability naturally broadens into wider enterprise connectivity and, over time, larger telecom rollout

Finally, defensibility is visible and compounding.The company has built an IP-led foundation with granted international patents, and the roadmap naturally broadens from FSO into a wider suite of laser-based optical products without changing the underlying technical core. That’s the kind of compounding we look for: one deep competence, expanding product surface area.

This round helps Velmenni do three things fast: scale deployments, expand into global markets, and double down on R&D to push its next generation of laser-based optical products.

The broader arc is clear. As networks proliferate and spectrum becomes more contested, connectivity will be defined by high throughput secure communication under real world constraints.. FSO can be a step-change here not as a niche alternative, but as a complementary layer that expands where and how high-quality links can be deployed.

We’re proud to partner with Velmenni as they build that new layer of global connectivity.

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