When internet service goes down, most people just wait. When it happens in underserved communities—where options are limited and outages are common—it becomes a systemic barrier to education, business, and emergency communication. Traditional ISPs aren’t built to solve this.

NovaMesh Systems believes people should be able to build the internet themselves.

The company’s decentralized mesh routers allow users to share connectivity directly with others in their area, forming resilient, peer-to-peer networks that operate independently from centralized infrastructure. Instead of relying on a single tower or fiber line, these systems spread signal across dozens or hundreds of nodes.

In just a few months, NovaMesh has rolled out over 1,800 devices across six cities, mostly in underserved neighborhoods and remote areas. Each node can route traffic, maintain encryption, and reward users with credits for contributing extra bandwidth. It’s a kind of internet co-op: the more people who join, the stronger the network becomes.

Governments are taking note. Several municipalities are now in early-stage discussions with NovaMesh to test rural applications and emergency communication use cases. The startup’s long-term goal isn’t just to improve access—but to rebuild internet infrastructure as something local, resilient, and community-owned.