For 35 years a homegrown carrier from Wilkesboro put bars on the map where the big networks saw only blank terrain. In 2026 it agreed to hand the signal to Verizon - a small-carrier story about who actually pays to cover a mountain.
Lantronix is an Irvine, California-based global provider of secure IoT and remote environment management solutions that combine intelligent hardware, connectivity, software-as-a-service and engineering services. Founded in 1989 and publicly traded on Nasdaq as LTRX, the company builds device servers, IoT gateways, cellular routers, console servers and PoE switches, paired with cloud management platforms like Percepxion and ConsoleFlow, to help organizations connect, compute, comprehend and control equipment at the edge across automotive, industrial, smart city, defense and enterprise IT markets.
Avneesh Agrawal is the co-founder and CEO of Netradyne, the San Diego AI company that turns dashcams into a real-time safety coach for commercial drivers. After more than a decade at Qualcomm, where he led 4G LTE research, ran corporate R&D, and served as president of Qualcomm India and South Asia, he left in 2015 to chase a convergence he saw coming: cheap camera sensors, edge computing, and deep learning arriving at the same moment. Netradyne's Driver-i platform now analyzes billions of miles of driving and reduces accidents by 30 to 50 percent. In January 2025, a $90 million Series D led by Point72 pushed the company past a $1 billion valuation. A Stanford PhD with more than 150 US patents, Agrawal builds at the intersection of research and the real world.
Bobby Bahl is the founder and CEO of teleSys Software, Inc., a San Mateo-based telecommunications software company he established in 1997. With over 40 years of industry experience, he led the deployment of the first SS7 signaling network in the United States at Sprint and managed the creation of Equal Access, the nation's first long-distance network. Under his leadership, teleSys has grown into a global provider of carrier-grade multi-generation signaling solutions, with 400+ installations serving 100+ operators across 80+ countries supporting more than 1 billion active subscribers.