Every fiber line and cell tower is the product of crews, photos, materials, and sign-offs that used to live in spreadsheets. A team of engineers in Cordoba, Argentina decided that was a problem worth solving.
Somewhere right now, a technician is standing at the base of a cell tower with a phone in one hand and a signal meter in the other. He takes a photo, jots a reading, and moves on. Multiply that by a few thousand crews, across a few thousand sites, in a country the size of Argentina, and you have the actual shape of a telecom rollout. Not a map. Not a Gantt chart. Thousands of small human actions that either add up to a working network or do not.
For most of the industry's history, those actions were tracked in spreadsheets and email threads. That is the problem Sytex set out to fix. The company, founded in 2019 in Cordoba and later part of Y Combinator's Summer 2022 batch, makes software for the unglamorous work behind infrastructure: deploying and maintaining telecom networks, energy sites, construction, and oil & gas projects. Customers include some of Latin America's largest operators - Telefonica, Claro, and the Brazilian ISP Brisanet among them.
The founders were not outsiders looking for a market. Mariano Lisiotti, the CEO, is a telecom engineer who spent years in project roles at companies like Nera, Ceragon, and Huawei. His co-founders - Juan Alvarez, Juanjo Ferrero, and Federico Garcia Dura - mix telecom and software backgrounds. They had lived the pain before they wrote a line of code to solve it.
Deploying technology at scale is a coordination problem more than an engineering one. A single network build involves permits, site surveys, equipment, subcontractors, safety checks, photographic evidence, and a chain of approvals - each step dependent on the one before it. When that lives in spreadsheets, the failure modes are predictable: a crew drives two hours to a site with the wrong information, a required photo is missing so a job can't be signed off, an invoice stalls because nobody can prove the work was done to spec.
The expensive version of this failure has a name in the industry: the revisit. Sending a crew back to a site they already visited is pure waste - fuel, hours, and a slipped deadline, all because a piece of information didn't travel correctly the first time. Sytex frames its entire product around closing that gap between what was planned in an office and what actually happened in the field.
Sytex is built around a simple loop. A manager designs a workflow - the stages, roles, checklists, and approvals for a given type of job - using a visual, no-code builder. Crews then execute that workflow on a mobile app that works offline, capturing location-verified check-ins, photos, meter readings, and signatures as they go. Everything they capture flows back into one shared record. As the company puts it: plan the process, execute it in the field, and turn every action into one living knowledge base.
Model stages, roles & checklists in a no-code builder
Crews capture evidence offline on mobile
Quality AI checks completeness at capture
Every action feeds one live knowledge base
The third step - validate - is where the company's recent work has concentrated. Sytex's Quality AI checks captured evidence for completeness and consistency at the moment it is taken, not days later at a desk. If a technician's photo is blurry or a required measurement is missing, the system can flag it while the crew is still on site. That is the difference between catching an error for free and paying for a revisit.
On top of the workflow engine, Sytex has added a set of AI features that reflect where the whole software industry is heading - but aimed at a decidedly practical target. Automation agents handle the routine plumbing: assigning tasks, sending notifications, syncing data across systems based on triggers. And then there is Alfred, the natural-language assistant, named like a butler for operations data.
Alfred's pitch is narrow and, for a field manager, compelling. Ask a question in plain language - how many sites finished this week, which crews are behind, where are materials short - and get a dashboard back in seconds. No SQL. No waiting in a queue for an analyst to build the report. For someone running operations at 6am before crews roll out, that speed is the entire value.
The people who open Sytex every day fall into a few groups. At the top are the operators - the carriers and infrastructure owners who commission the work and need to see, in real time, whether it is getting done. Below them sit the contractors who actually field the crews, often juggling several projects for several clients at once. And at the edge are the technicians themselves, for whom the entire product reduces to one question: does the app work when the signal doesn't. Offline capture is not a feature for them; it is the difference between a usable tool and a dead screen at a remote site.
That range is also why the founders' resumes matter. Building software for a telecom technician is hard to fake. You have to know what a site survey involves, why a particular photo angle is required for an audit, how materials get reconciled against a work order. Lisiotti and his co-founders spent careers inside companies like Huawei, Ericsson, Nera, and Ceragon before starting Sytex - which means the product tends to reflect how the work is really done, not how a designer imagined it from a desk.
Sytex sits inside a category that has been building quietly for years: vertical software for work that happens outside of an office. The generic tools it competes against are the ones every company already has - Excel, Microsoft Project, Smartsheet - plus horizontal field-service platforms like ServiceMax, Salesforce Field Service, and Sitetracker. The horizontal players are broad; Sytex's bet is that infrastructure deployment is specific enough to deserve software that understands materials, work orders, site evidence, and multi-tier subcontractors out of the box.
Its customer list is the clearest argument for that bet. When operators the size of Telefonica and Claro use your platform to build their networks, and a mobile operator like Brisanet runs a 5G rollout on it - from site selection through to network activation - you are no longer selling a nicety. You are part of the machine that turns capital budgets into coverage. That is a durable place to sit.
Sytex is a B2B SaaS company in the classic sense: it sells platform access to operators and contractors, and its pricing rides on the savings it creates - faster rollouts, fewer revisits, cheaper report reviews. The team is small, in the range of two dozen people, and distributed, leaning on tools like Remote, Deel, and Gusto to run a team without a single headquarters floor.
The location matters. Cordoba is not Buenos Aires and it is certainly not San Francisco. Argentina keeps producing companies that do a lot with modest funding, and Sytex fits the mold - a YC-backed seed, a reported total raise on the smaller side, and a customer base that spans the continent. The company's own framing of the shift it sells is worth borrowing: customers describe the old way of working as static - noise, spreadsheets, phone calls - and the new way as signal. In an industry that literally sells signal, that is a fitting way to describe the product.
The most durable software companies tend to solve problems that no one enjoys thinking about. Coordinating field crews is exactly that kind of problem - unglamorous, unavoidable, and expensive when it goes wrong. Sytex did not invent a new industry. It picked one that already spends billions and built the operating layer it was missing. Whether it becomes a large independent company or a category that gets absorbed, the underlying observation holds: the systems of record for the physical world are being written now, and someone has to write the one for the crews putting fiber in the ground.
For now, the next time your phone jumps from three bars to five, there is a reasonable chance the work behind it was tracked, checked, and signed off on software built by four engineers in Cordoba who got tired of doing it in Excel.
Watch & learn: Sytex has not published a central YouTube channel; product demos and walkthroughs are available on request through sytex.io, and founder Mariano Lisiotti's background is detailed on LinkedIn.