A drone can make a cell tower look almost glamorous. It circles the steel, gathers hundreds of images and returns with a view no clipboard ever managed. Every bolt seems available. Every antenna has its close-up. Then the aircraft lands, the files multiply, and someone still has to decide what any of it means. Anne Zink built a company in that awkward space between seeing and knowing.
The observation that became 5x5 Technologies was delightfully blunt: inspections produced “lots of pretty pictures” but too little actionable information. The phrase reveals Zink’s instinct as an operator. She is interested in technology, but only after asking what happens on Monday morning. Can the engineer measure from it? Can the field crew prepare before climbing? Can the leasing team see available space? Can finance understand the condition of an asset without commissioning another expedition?
Her answer became a system that turns field imagery into precise 3D models, then uses computer vision, analytics and human review to pull useful facts from those models. It is a digital twin with work clothes on. The point is not to admire the tower on a screen. The point is to help several departments agree on what is actually standing in the field.
The commercial translator
Zink did not arrive at infrastructure software through a conventional engineering path. She studied political science and economics at St. John Fisher College and SUNY Empire State College. Before 5x5, she led AZtech Strategies, working on strategic sales, product launches, thought leadership and organizational change. Her professional biography describes more than eighteen years helping companies bring disruptive products and services to market, with projects touching civil registries, security platforms, business-process outsourcing and cybersecurity.
That history gives her a particular place in a technical company: the commercial translator. Engineers can explain what a model can calculate. Customers explain the irritation, delay or risk that occupies their day. A founder has to make the two descriptions meet without sanding off the difficult details. Zink has said 5x5 was designed from the customer up. In practice, that means the product must survive contact with the sales team, the operations desk, the engineer and the finance department.
“You get lots of pretty pictures when you are inspecting with a drone, but not a lot of actionable information.”Anne Zink on the insight behind 5x5
This is more demanding than making a handsome model. Each group asks a different question of the same physical object. A tower owner may care about maintenance. A carrier may care about room for another antenna. A technician may care about what awaits at height. An engineer cares about dimensions and loading. If they each keep a separate version of reality, the tower acquires several bureaucratic twins, all slightly estranged from the steel itself.
A partnership with altitude
The company’s first major chapter was telecom. Founded in Florida in 2016, 5x5 launched software and data services for tower inspection. Two years later, SoftBank invested about $4 million and acquired exclusive rights to use and sell the technology in Japan. The work addressed an unromantic global fact: bridges, plants and towers were aging while inspection labor was becoming harder to secure. A drone could reduce the distance between inspector and asset. A sufficiently accurate model could preserve what the drone observed and make it measurable later.
SoftBank described models with distance errors measured in millimeters and proposed combining them with AI to detect problems such as rust, cracks and missing hardware. Zink said the partnership supported a long-term vision of drone-powered inspection. The arrangement was more than a funding milestone. It showed the product could travel into another regulatory environment and address assets beyond the original American tower workflow.
The platform grew in layers. An enterprise cloud product arrived in 2019. Government work and U.S. patents followed in 2020. A Series B and European expansion came in 2021. The United Kingdom arrived in 2022, along with applications for architecture, engineering and construction. APAC and a place in Tomorrow Street, the Vodafone and Technoport innovation venture, followed in 2023. Africa and additional infrastructure verticals entered the timeline in 2024.
The human inside the machine
By 2025 the company’s product had a new umbrella name, Platform Five. Its ingredients sound familiar in the age of industrial AI: multiple methods of data capture, 3D twins, analytics and automated workflows. The consequential phrase is less fashionable: human in the loop. A tower is a poor place for an algorithm to bluff. Engineering-grade work needs a trail from observation to measurement to validation, especially when the output influences field labor, structural decisions or capital spending.
Zink’s company does not present human review as an embarrassment to automation. It treats review as part of the product. This makes sense when the physical world refuses to behave like a clean spreadsheet. Antennas overlap. Images miss angles. Records grow stale. Components weather. A reliable operating picture must admit that certainty is earned one check at a time.
The same principle explains why 5x5 emphasizes access across departments. Trust is not simply a technical score. It is the ability of a field manager to understand where a measurement came from, of an engineer to interrogate it, and of a colleague elsewhere to see the same evidence. The digital twin becomes useful when it reduces the number of private truths circulating around one public object.
“We know that wireless infrastructure is AI infrastructure.”Anne Zink, July 2026
That line points toward the company’s current ambition. As computation moves closer to users, towers and wireless sites may host more than radios. They can become distributed locations for AI compute, which makes knowledge about space, power, structural capacity and network context commercially important. In July 2026, 5x5 hired structural engineer Pankaj Taneja to lead distributed AI micro edge intelligence work. The title is a mouthful. The strategy is plain: the tower database may help decide where the next layer of computing can physically live.
A founder outside the usual map
Zink lives in Durango, Colorado. Her company is headquartered in St. Petersburg, Florida, and describes a global footprint. She also likes to travel and ski, details that suit a founder whose working map has never been especially obedient. During the pandemic, 5x5 operated as a fully virtual company and maintained customer and supplier relationships without the usual travel. Long before distributed work became a management genre, the company had to make distance ordinary.
Her comments about entrepreneurship carry the same appetite for a wider map. In a 2021 conversation about women executives in St. Petersburg, Zink argued that younger technology communities could create openings that entrenched hubs did not. She encouraged women founders to use local economic-development programs and networks such as Synapse. More companies succeeding, she said, was better for everyone.
It is a cooperative view of ambition. A startup ecosystem is not a private elevator with one founder frantically pressing the close button. It is closer to the infrastructure Zink sells: shared, improved by accurate information and more valuable when many people can use it. Her public record also emphasizes family, friends, travel and skiing. The picture is not of a founder performing permanent urgency. It is of an operator who has stayed with one stubborn industrial problem long enough to watch it become several adjacent opportunities.
The useful twin
There is a temptation in technology to confuse the vivid demonstration with the finished work. Drone footage is vivid. A rotating 3D tower is vivid. Artificial intelligence drawing boxes around components is vivid. Maintenance records, validation queues and cross-department handoffs are less likely to draw a crowd. They are also where value either appears or quietly goes missing.
Zink’s career has been built in that second territory. Her product philosophy begins after the demo, when the customer asks whether the output can be trusted, shared and turned into a decision. The lesson is portable beyond towers: begin with the action, then work backward to the data. Keep the human who owns the consequence inside the workflow. Let the model be impressive only insofar as it makes reality easier to manage.
A cell tower does not speak, of course. It oxidizes, flexes, carries equipment and accumulates paperwork. Zink’s wager is that a faithful digital record can make those changes legible before another truck rolls or another climber leaves the ground. The future of infrastructure may be full of synthetic twins and edge intelligence. Its daily progress will still depend on an old-fashioned virtue: telling the truth about what is there.