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Unitel T+ wants more than your phone bill
Cape Verde’s telecom challenger has expanded from SIM cards into living rooms, offices and holiday itineraries. Its next contest is over the infrastructure that makes those services possible.
Kigen wants your next SIM to disappear
The Arm spinout puts cellular identity inside connected devices, from cattle tags to electricity grids. Its real business is making those devices manageable long after they leave the factory.
Benjamin Forgan Is Building the Quiet Layer That Keeps the Physical World Online
A broken connection in Singapore became a decade-long lesson in infrastructure: make cellular access programmable, design failure out of the system, and let builders concentrate on what their devices actually do.
Roger Dewey Put the Tiny SIM Card in Charge
For decades, telecom treated the SIM as a passport. Roger Dewey saw a pocket-sized computer - and built a company around letting it make decisions.
Able Device Bet the Tiny SIM Card Could Run Your IoT Fleet. Now the Market Is Catching Up.
For 16 years, a nine-person Raleigh company has argued that the most underused computer in telecom is already inside the device. SIMbae turns that overlooked chip into a programmable traffic cop for connected fleets - with no new hardware and far less Java Card work.
The $3 SIM That Turned Carrier Chaos Into a Global IoT Business
Hologram sells 'phone plans for things that aren't phones.' Its real product is relief: one SIM, one dashboard, and fewer 2 a.m. calls when a carrier goes dark.
The Budget-Phone Brand That Grew Up and Went Enterprise
NUU spent a decade selling cheap unlocked Androids to Americans who hated overpaying. Then a pandemic pushed it into a stranger, stickier business: building custom phones for companies who never wanted to be phone companies.
The Challenger Optus Couldn't Beat - So It Bought Instead
amaysim spent a decade undercutting Australia's big telcos with no-contract SIM plans and a name that promised things stay amazingly simple. In 2021 the network it rode on paid A$250 million to own it.
AIRLINQ
The connected world runs on a mess of SIMs, carriers, invoices and national rules. AIRLINQ wants to turn that mess into one control panel - and make every connected car, meter and machine easier to operate as a business.
Popcorn
Popcorn is an AI-native, software-first telco that sells a single global phone plan - unlimited talk, text and data across 180+ countries with no roaming fees, delivered over eSIM for about $69 a month. Beyond connectivity, Popcorn layers AI on the line itself: screening calls, taking notes, and defending against deepfakes and SIM-swap fraud, while offering developer SDKs and APIs to add voice, messaging and phone numbers in a few lines of code. Founded in 2023 and based in New York, it argues telecom has barely changed in 25 years and rebuilds it as cloud software.
Ahmed Khattak
Ahmed Khattak is the founder and CEO of US Mobile, the only American carrier built natively on the public cloud that lets customers ride and switch between all three major networks (Verizon, AT&T, T-Mobile) on demand. A Pakistani immigrant who landed on an F1 student visa, he spent a decade clawing US Mobile to $100M in annual recurring revenue, then doubled it to $200M in nine months. Before that he co-founded GSM Nation, a $130M unlocked-phone marketplace that taught him how the carriers really make money.
Neel Popat
Neel Popat is the CEO and co-founder of Popcorn, a software-first 'next-gen telco' that sells one global eSIM phone plan with unlimited talk, text, and data across 180+ countries and no roaming fees. A British-Indian former finance professional turned serial founder, he coded a viral message board at 13, studied mathematics at LSE, spent a decade inside investment funds, then built the crypto-investing app Donut through Entrepreneur First. When Donut's custody partner Genesis went bankrupt, Popat fought through the wind-down and returned 100% of user funds before channeling the lessons into Popcorn.
TextNow
TextNow is a Waterloo-born wireless company that gives people phone service for free by letting advertisers, not subscribers, foot the bill. Started in 2009 as a way to dodge texting fees, it has grown into the largest provider of free mobile phone service in the United States, offering unlimited talk, text, and free essential data over a nationwide 5G network through its app-based MVNO. With roughly 10 million monthly active users and revenue north of $100 million, TextNow built a real telecom business on a simple bet: communication should be a right, paid for by ads rather than by the people who can least afford a phone bill.
US Mobile
US Mobile is a New York-based mobile virtual network operator that lets customers build their own wireless plans and switch between Verizon, AT&T, and T-Mobile on a single line. Branded internally as Warp (Verizon), Dark Star (AT&T), and Light Speed (T-Mobile), its 'Teleport' multi-network technology and eSIM-first approach have pushed it toward a self-styled 'Super Carrier' that now also bundles Starlink home internet. Founded in 2015 by Ahmed Khattak, it has grown from a niche unlocked-phone reseller to roughly a million customers.
SIMO
SIMO is a San Francisco mobile-connectivity company whose patented virtual SIM (vSIM) lets devices roam across 300+ carriers in 140+ countries with no physical SIM card. Founded in 2009 as Skyroam, it now powers the Solis line of pocket hotspots for consumers and an embedded chipset/cloud platform used by enterprises, automakers and IoT fleets.
Marc Jones
Marc E. Jones is the Board Chairman of Aeris Communications, a San Jose-based IoT connectivity company he has led since 2005 and served as President & CEO from 2008 through early 2025. A Stanford undergraduate and law school graduate who grew up in the south suburbs of Chicago, Jones transformed Aeris from a company on the verge of collapse — personally investing alongside employees to rescue it — into a global IoT platform managing nearly 100 million connected devices including 41 million connected vehicles for Fortune 500 clients such as Chrysler, Honda, and Bosch. Named by Goldman Sachs as one of the nation's best entrepreneurs in 2012 and 2013, he also serves on the boards of CDW, Ingersoll Rand, Stanford University, and Stanford Health Care, and chairs Management Leadership for Tomorrow (MLT), a nonprofit dedicated to advancing underrepresented minorities into executive roles.
Sunil Kaul
Sunil Kaul is the CEO of Airlinq, a Silicon Valley-based enterprise IoT platform company serving automakers, mobile network operators, and enterprises with a secure, scalable, AI-powered platform for connected vehicle and IoT ecosystem management. With over 20 years in telecommunications, Kaul has grown Airlinq into a globally recognized leader in IoT connectivity management, earning top rankings from Kaleido Intelligence, Counterpoint Research, and Frost & Sullivan, while forging partnerships with major names like Volvo, Verizon, NTT DOCOMO, Jio, and Tata.