Making the purchase of enterprise networks as simple as ordering online - one platform, a thousand carriers.
Ask any IT director about the last time their company ordered internet for a new office, and you will hear a story about phone calls. Weeks of them. Quotes scrawled across email threads and PDFs. Contracts that renew without anyone noticing. Enterprise telecom, one of the largest categories of corporate spend, has stayed stubbornly analog while nearly everything around it moved online. Lightyear, a New York software company founded in 2019, exists to change that.
Lightyear builds what it calls a "Telecom Operating System" - a single software platform where enterprises can procure, track, and pay for network services across their entire footprint. That includes internet access, dedicated fiber, SD-WAN, broadband, and voice, sourced from a marketplace of more than 1,000 carriers and internet service providers. Instead of dialing sales reps one at a time, a network team can compare options by location, get quotes, place orders, manage installation, and keep every circuit and contract in one system of record.
The founding insight came from frustration. Dennis Thankachan, Lightyear's co-founder and CEO, spent the early part of his career at Goldman Sachs and then at PointState Capital, a hedge fund with a focus on telecommunications. Covering the sector taught him how the industry worked from the inside - and how painfully manual its buying process was. He has described the vision plainly: buying enterprise telecom should feel "kind of like buying socks on Amazon."
Alongside co-founder and CTO Ryan Schrack, Thankachan set out to digitize a market that most software founders avoid precisely because it is complicated and unglamorous. That difficulty is also the moat. Carrier coverage, pricing, and availability vary block by block; consolidating that fragmented reality into a usable interface is hard-won work, not a weekend project.
By late 2024 the bet was paying off. Lightyear had grown to more than 300 enterprise customers and over 5,000 users, managing millions of dollars in telecom spend. In November of that year it closed a $31 million Series B round led by Altos Ventures - capital earmarked for deepening its three core product lines and building new tools around network monitoring, AI, and bulk-site procurement.
Historically, enterprises had almost no visibility into what their network cost or which providers could even reach a location.
Enterprise networking is essential and enormous, yet the way companies buy it has barely changed in decades. A regional retailer opening twenty new stores might need internet at every location, each served by a different mix of carriers with different prices and lead times. Traditionally that meant relying on brokers, master agents, and manual outreach - a process measured in weeks, with little transparency into cost or performance.
The consequences compound over time. Companies lose track of what circuits they have, keep paying for services they no longer use, and miss renewal dates that quietly lock them into higher rates. Lightyear's argument is that this is fundamentally a data and software problem. Give network teams a single source of truth - what they own, where, from whom, and at what cost - and the waste, the phone tag, and the guesswork start to disappear.
Lightyear built its platform the way durable platforms are usually built - one module at a time, each earning the right to the next.
A marketplace and quoting engine to compare, source, and buy network services from 1,000+ carriers - with automated quoting and installation management across every location.
A centralized system of record for every service, circuit, contract, and site - so teams finally know what they have, where it lives, and what it costs.
Fragmented carrier invoices collapsed into one view, with automated monitoring and payment - telecom expense management without the spreadsheets.
Public APIs plus AI features, including natural-language querying of network data and custom charts - so users can ask questions of their network in plain English.
Lightyear is a B2B SaaS business. It sells software subscriptions to enterprises for managing telecom procurement, inventory, and billing, and it operates a marketplace connecting those enterprises with more than 1,000 carrier and ISP partners. In effect, it sits between the buyer and a fractured supply side, turning both into a single, navigable interface.
Where does it fit in the market? Lightyear competes with the manual status quo - carrier-direct sales and legacy telecom brokers - as well as with established telecom expense management vendors like Tangoe, Sakon, and vCom. Its differentiation is combining the front end (procurement across a live carrier marketplace) with the back end (inventory and billing) in one product, rather than bolting expense management onto contracts someone else negotiated.
Series B (Nov 2024): $31M led by Altos Ventures, with Ridge Ventures, Amplo, Zigg Capital, and Susa Ventures. Total-raised figures range across public sources; treat as approximate.
The roster is strikingly diverse - fast food, fashion, jewelry, healthcare, and cybersecurity all share the same underlying problem: many locations, many carriers, one headache.
Across those accounts, Lightyear reports 5,000+ enterprise users and quotes processed for tens of thousands of services. The through-line is scale: the more sites and carriers a company juggles, the more a single operating system is worth.
Dennis Thankachan and Ryan Schrack launch Lightyear to digitize enterprise telecom procurement.
The procurement marketplace and carrier network scale up, backed by Ridge Ventures, Amplo, Zigg Capital, and Susa Ventures.
Launches Network Inventory Manager, Bill Consolidation, and public APIs - moving from procurement into full lifecycle management.
Closes a Series B led by Altos Ventures, reaching 300+ enterprises and 5,000+ users.
Lightyear provides a software platform - a "Telecom Operating System" - that lets enterprises procure, manage, and pay for network services like internet, fiber, SD-WAN, and voice across a marketplace of 1,000+ carriers.
It was founded in 2019 by Dennis Thankachan (Co-Founder & CEO), a former Goldman Sachs banker and PointState Capital analyst, and Ryan Schrack (Co-Founder & CTO).
More than 300 enterprises and 5,000+ users, including Palo Alto Networks, Five Guys, Alo Yoga, Pandora Jewelry, and Teladoc.
Lightyear raised a $31M Series B in November 2024 led by Altos Ventures. Total funding is reported at roughly $48M-$80M across public sources.
Rather than relying on manual phone calls and brokers, Lightyear digitizes the full telecom lifecycle - procurement, inventory, and billing - into one data-driven platform integrated with a broad carrier marketplace.