The internet has a comic timing problem. A packet can cross a continent before a human finishes blinking, while the commercial machinery behind that trip may still be waiting for somebody to open an attachment. For years, network providers traded building lists, serviceability claims, prices and routes through spreadsheets and email. The infrastructure was glass and light. The buying process had the glamour of an expense report.
Ben Edmond knew this peculiar contrast from the inside. He had sold networks, marketed them, helped build them and bought pieces of them from other providers. He had watched engineers and go-to-market teams struggle to agree on where a network actually went. By the time he founded the company now called Connectbase in 2015, he had spent roughly two decades learning the operating guts of connectivity. His startup thesis came from the accumulated irritation of a practitioner.
The important question was deceptively ordinary: what can you sell at this address? In telecom, the answer is rarely universal. Fiber is costly to lay, geography is stubborn, and even a familiar national provider reaches only a portion of possible business locations with its own facilities. Providers must buy from one another to complete networks for customers. Every seller becomes a buyer somewhere else. The market is an ecosystem because concrete, capital and distance leave it no choice.
“My strategy and vision have been aligned since day one.”Ben Edmond
A career measured in network eras
Edmond arrived at MCI after finishing undergraduate studies at Northeastern University in the mid-1990s, when long-distance service was still something households chose and discussed. MCI was the challenger to AT&T, and telecom was becoming the scaffolding of a new public internet. He began in sales, then gathered experience across product, marketing, delivery and operations. He later worked at Xspedius Communications, moved into senior sales and marketing leadership at FiberLight, and became chief revenue officer at Global Capacity.
Those jobs supplied three views of the same messy table. At Xspedius he saw the carrier side. At FiberLight he saw the infrastructure layer and the economics of building large fiber networks. At Global Capacity he ran revenue for a business that depended on hundreds of supplier networks and often bought small elements to assemble a larger service. The angle changed. The underlying data problem kept returning.
At Global Capacity, Edmond helped orchestrate an acquisition that took the business past $200 million in scale. The organic growth engine was working and the investor had earned a strong return. He could have continued as an executive inside a larger organization. Instead, around his forty-second birthday, he decided the next chapter would belong to an idea he considered purposeful.
The domestic pitch was refreshingly unvarnished. Edmond had married his wife, Susie, one month after leaving Northeastern. When he proposed starting the company, their sons were seven and nine. He was offering no salary, long hours and risk in exchange for the chance to change something meaningful. His family supported the leap. It was the sort of deal that only affection could make look properly underwritten.
The least glamorous wedge wins
From October 2015 through the following March, Edmond built. In April 2016, the young company launched Building List Manager. The name did not attempt seduction. It converted the Excel workflow used by fiber providers to share where they could serve into a cloud-based process. First make the supply legible. Then make it discoverable. Eventually, connect it to buyers.
The first go-to-market motion was what Edmond has jokingly called “Friends of Ben.” The phrase sounds casual until one notices the compound interest behind it. Twenty years in a specialized industry had given him relationships with competitive fiber operators, along with an intimate understanding of their pain. He began where trust was high and resistance was low. These operators were more willing to share data and try a fresh workflow than the giant carriers were.
Connectbase bootstrapped. Edmond expected to raise money eventually, but wanted evidence first. Roughly two years into the journey, the company had nearly 100 customers on the supplier side before taking outside capital. A later founder interview put the march to $1 million in annual recurring revenue at 14 months. The route was not a fashionable blitz across a market. It was a deliberate accumulation of cleaned data, useful software and references from people who already knew the problem.
This sequence contains a useful marketplace lesson. Founders are often told to solve the cold-start problem by producing both sides at once. Edmond started with supply. The early platform helped providers clean, manage and publish data. Only after that foundation became valuable did Connectbase grow toward a two-sided, API-connected fabric. Four years passed before the fuller buy-sell model reached the market.
The connectivity transaction, tidied up
Location becomes the product
Connectbase’s organizing idea is “Location Truth.” A street address is not merely a pin on a consumer map. For a connectivity transaction, it is a bundle of claims: which networks touch the building, which run nearby, what construction may be required, what services are available, how long delivery could take and what the price should be. A confident “on-net” in a spreadsheet can become an expensive apology when crews discover otherwise.
The company developed a global location identifier to make those claims more consistent across providers. Its platform now spans discovery, quoting, ordering, inventory and spend intelligence. Connectbase says it handles more than four million quotes each month and maintains data covering billions of locations across hundreds of network providers. The figures are impressive mainly because they expose the scale of the clerical burden the industry had learned to tolerate.
Edmond describes Connectbase as an operating system for buying and selling connectivity. He also calls it a matchmaker. The second description is warmer and perhaps more precise. Buyers want reach, speed and control. Sellers want demand, useful positioning and fewer bespoke integrations. The software creates the introduction, carries the relevant facts and tries to keep bad data from arriving in a borrowed tuxedo.
“We’re a matchmaker at heart.”Ben Edmond
The company itself changed names as the mission broadened. Connected2Fiber became Connectbase in 2022. Acquisitions extended the platform: LastMileXchange added international pricing and marketplace capabilities; MasterStream brought telecom-focused configure-price-and-quote software; and the 2025 purchase of Cloud Age added invoice automation and spend management across more than 1,700 providers. Equality Asset Management invested alongside the Cloud Age transaction to support further growth.
Automation with a guest list
For a founder selling automation, Edmond is notably insistent on human contact. Connectbase runs The Connected World LIVE, an annual gathering for customers, suppliers, buyers and partners. His rationale is plain: “People still matter.” The company may connect trading partners through software, but introductions, education and trust still benefit from a room full of humans.
That belief also shaped his early advisory board. Edmond formed it in the second year, drawing on experienced industry operators such as Mark Dyman, John Dobbins, Tony Rossabi, Ernest Ortega and others. He offered equity rather than treating advice as a ceremonial favor. The arrangement reflected a broader habit: align people with the outcome, then ask them to help make the product and business more durable.
Colleagues have described Edmond as able to translate complex technical matters into management objectives. One former FiberLight colleague offered a more memorable diagnosis: “Ben doesn’t have a box.” Edmond embraces it. He considers himself an intrapreneur even in the companies he did not found, continually pressing against the established way of doing things. His personal motto for 2025, borrowed from Winston Churchill, was “ACTION THIS DAY.” The capitals seem native to the temperament.
There is curiosity mixed into the urgency. Edmond calls himself a nerd who likes to explore. He experiments with several AI systems, listens to books through Audible and, for fun, has queued up physics. He recommends David Deutsch’s The Beginning of Infinity and Dan Caruso’s Bandwidth, the latter a history of the internet age whose events overlap with his own early career.
The next network buyer may be software
AI has given Connectbase both a new tool and a new customer problem. Training clusters and inference services require fresh network routes, low latency and access to compute. In 2025 the company announced plans to support GPU-as-a-Service commerce, bringing compute capacity into the same federated environment as connectivity. Edmond argues that networks will become a trust layer for autonomous systems, where machine buyers expect serviceability, price and delivery claims in a verifiable format.
That future sharpens the original thesis. A human account manager can sometimes rescue dubious data with goodwill, dinner and a phone call. Software will simply query the location and route the transaction elsewhere if the answer cannot be verified. The familiar compromises of telecom commerce become less survivable when the buyer is an agent.
A decade after the leap, Edmond still talks about the same problem that appeared in his self-deprecating “ugly” 2016 pitch deck. The company name changed. The product surface expanded. AI arrived. Yet the stubborn center held: location determines what can be sold, no provider can build everywhere, and an ecosystem works only when participants can trust the facts moving between them.
The poetry of the project is accidental but satisfying. Connectbase wants the commercial layer beneath the internet to behave more like the internet itself: connected, responsive and able to find a path. Edmond chose a business where progress can be measured by the disappearance of emails, swivel-chair data entry and swollen workbooks. Civilization will not erect a statue to the last telecom spreadsheet. It may, however, send the file as an attachment.