Tagged: telecom
30 results
Dennis Thankachan
Dennis Thankachan is the co-founder and CEO of Lightyear, a New York software company that automates how enterprises buy and manage telecom and network services. A former Goldman Sachs banker and hedge fund investor at PointState Capital, he built a thesis around telecom while investing in the sector, then left finance in 2019 to fix an industry he describes as a multi-trillion-dollar market with almost no happy customers. Under his leadership Lightyear has raised roughly $48.6 million, closed a $31 million Series B led by Altos Ventures in 2024, and serves customers including Palo Alto Networks, Five Guys, Pandora Jewelry, and Teladoc.
Lightyear
Lightyear is a New York-based enterprise software company building a 'Telecom Operating System' that digitizes how large organizations buy and manage network services. Founded in 2019 by Dennis Thankachan and Ryan Schrack, the platform automates telecom procurement, network inventory management, and bill consolidation across a marketplace of 1,000+ carriers, replacing a process that has traditionally relied on phone calls, spreadsheets, and weeks of waiting. It serves 300+ enterprises and 5,000+ users, including Palo Alto Networks, Five Guys, Alo Yoga, Pandora Jewelry, and Teladoc.
TechSee
TechSee is an Israel-based enterprise software company that uses computer vision, augmented reality and multimodal generative AI to add sight to customer service. Its Sophie AI platform lets customers and technicians point a smartphone camera at a device so the system can recognize the product, diagnose the issue and guide a step-by-step fix - either fully self-service or as an assist for a human agent. Founded in 2015, TechSee works with global brands such as Verizon, Vodafone, Orange and Telus to raise first-call resolution and cut costly truck rolls.
Megan Mackh
Megan Mackh is Vice President of Commercial Sales at Salesforce, where she leads teams driving customer success across cloud solutions. A Stanford and UC Berkeley Haas School of Business alumna, she spent nearly 15 years at Google - rising through AdWords, inside sales, and ultimately heading Global Telecommunications Partnerships for Google Cloud across 60+ telco partners worldwide. Named to CRN's Women of the Channel in 2020 and 2021, she is known for building high-performing teams and taking bold leaps into leadership from an unusually early age - she managed 18 people at AT&T at 22. She is currently pursuing a Doctorate in Public Health at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.
Giuseppe Incitti
Giuseppe Incitti is the CEO of Sitetracker, the Montclair, New Jersey enterprise software company whose platform helps utilities, telecom operators, and EV charging companies manage the deployment and lifecycle of high-volume infrastructure assets. Since taking over in 2016 he has grown the company from about 30 employees to roughly 400 and raised more than $200M in equity and debt, including a $66M Series D in 2022. A Stevens Institute engineer who started in investment banking at Morgan Stanley and JPMorgan before operating roles at TIBCO and MongoDB, Incitti is a vocal advocate that digital transformation is no longer optional for the companies building the grid, the network, and the charging stations of the next decade.
Kurt Dobbins
Kurt Dobbins is the founder and CEO of Nrby, a New Hampshire company building AI-driven predictive network intelligence for broadband and telecom operators. A serial entrepreneur and networking engineer with more than three decades in the industry, he previously founded Ellacoya Networks (acquired by Arbor Networks) and Deep Information Sciences, and earlier served as technical director at Cabletron Systems. He is the named inventor on more than a dozen networking and communications patents and describes himself as a lifelong builder of ideas that challenge convention and reshape industries.
Tashinga Musiyazviriyo
Tashinga Musiyazviriyo is the Founder and CEO of The Singular, a Johannesburg-based digital transformation company building purpose-driven IoT, AI, and private 5G network solutions across industries including mining, telecommunications, manufacturing, smart cities, and healthcare. With a career forged inside Ericsson's core network engineering teams and a deep grounding in mobile network design and performance, Tashinga brings both technical precision and entrepreneurial drive to the challenge of connecting Africa's industries to the future.
Clad
Clad is project management and billing software purpose-built for infrastructure. It unifies project operations and finance so telecom operators and construction subcontractors can track production in the field, automate invoicing and payments, manage vendor compliance, and handle 811 utility locate requests - all in one place. Founded in 2022 by ex-Instagram product manager Jason Rudin and backed by Y Combinator (W23), Clad aims to help the companies rebuilding America's internet and power networks build faster and get paid faster.
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.
Enlai Chu
Enlai Chu is the founder and CEO of Productive.ai (Phoneic, Inc.), an AI call assistant that turns ordinary mobile phone calls into transcribed, summarized, CRM-logged records of work. A telecom builder with 25-plus years across messaging, voice and video, he co-founded the early group-texting startup 3jam (acquired by Skype in 2011), then held product roles at Skype and Microsoft before returning to founder life. His through-line: phone calls are where business actually happens, yet the moment you hang up the value vanishes.
Sail Internet
Sail Internet is a Santa Clara-based internet service provider that uses a hybrid of fiber and fixed-wireless technology to deliver high-speed, no-contract broadband to homes and businesses across the San Francisco Bay Area and Silicon Valley. Founded in 2015 by Stanford-trained broadband engineers, the company positions itself as a customer-first, net-neutral alternative to incumbent cable and telecom giants, reaching residences, multi-dwelling communities, and enterprises with gigabit-class connectivity that skips costly trench-and-dig infrastructure.
HyperLight Corporation
HyperLight is a Cambridge, Massachusetts company that designs and manufactures photonic integrated circuits on thin-film lithium niobate (TFLN), a material prized for ultrafast, low-voltage electro-optic modulation. A 2018 spin-out from Marko Loncar's lab at Harvard, the company built what it describes as the industry's first high-volume, qualified 6-inch TFLN manufacturing line - now expanding to 8-inch - and packages it as a modular TFLN Chiplet platform. Its modulator chips target the bandwidth and power-efficiency demands of AI data centers, telecom optical networks and high-performance computing, enabling 1.6 Tbps-class links at CMOS-level drive voltages.
Zinier
Zinier is a San Mateo-based enterprise software company that builds an AI-driven, no-code field service management (FSM) platform. It helps large organizations in telecom, utilities, energy and manufacturing schedule, dispatch and equip the technicians who install and maintain physical assets in the field. Its Studio Z no-code builders, Z Productivity Suite and generative-AI assistant Z Sidekick let companies tailor workflows and deploy specialized AI agents that automate routine coordination so human technicians can focus on the work only they can do.
Noel Goddard
Noel Goddard is the CEO of Qunnect, a Brooklyn-based quantum networking company building hardware that turns ordinary telecom fiber into quantum-secure networks - at room temperature, no exotic cooling required. A biophysicist with a Rockefeller PhD and a Harvard fellowship, she taught physics at Hunter College, founded two biotech startups, and worked as a deep-tech seed investor before joining Qunnect in 2020 as COO and then CEO. Under her, Qunnect commercialized the world's first room-temperature quantum memory, ran a 34km entanglement link over live New York City fiber, and raised an oversubscribed Series A led by Airbus Ventures.
Orisa Cherenfant
Orisa Cherenfant is SVP of Industry Relations & Strategic Growth at Twilio, the cloud communications platform powering billions of messages, calls, and interactions globally. A first-generation college graduate from Cape Verde who earned dual degrees in Finance and Marketing from Boston College, she built her career through GE's leadership development programs before moving into tech. At Twilio, she leads industry partnerships and growth strategy, speaks at major conferences like MWC Barcelona and Twilio Signal, and was named a 2025 Entreprenista 100 Award winner. She is based in Los Angeles with her partner Eli and their twins, Margaux and Maverick.
Ross Ortega
Ross Ortega is VP of Product Management at Microsoft, currently leading Discovery and Communications initiatives. He previously built a $1 billion portfolio of Azure networking services - including ExpressRoute, Virtual WAN, Application Gateway, and Web Application Firewall - and then led Azure for Operators, Microsoft's 5G and edge computing platform for telecommunications providers. Before Microsoft, he co-founded Consystant Design Technologies and served as President and CTO of GraniteEdge Networks. A career technologist with roots in embedded systems and networking, Ortega has spent over two decades at Microsoft shaping how enterprises and telecoms connect to the cloud.
Jing Liu
Jing Liu is the Founder and CEO of SIMO (formerly Skyroam), the AI-driven cloud connectivity platform that lets devices roam across 300+ mobile carriers in 145+ countries without a physical SIM card. She founded the company in 2008 in Silicon Valley, pioneered patented virtual SIM (vSIM) technology, raised $63.5M in funding including a $20M Series C2 in 2019, and has built SIMO into a platform serving over 15 million users and 6+ million connected IoT devices. Under her leadership, SIMO extended its reach from travel hotspots to enterprise IoT, automotive, and mission-critical connectivity.
Alexey Aylarov
Alexey Aylarov is the CEO and co-founder of Voximplant, a Voice AI orchestration and cloud communications platform (CPaaS) powering 30,000+ customers and 2+ billion calls annually. A VoIP engineer turned serial entrepreneur, he spent 20+ years in telecommunications before building Voximplant into an enterprise-grade platform combining serverless infrastructure with AI-driven voice and video communications. Based in Sunnyvale, California, he co-founded the company in 2013 alongside Sergey Poroshin and Andrey Kovalenko, guiding it to profitability in under two years and through a $30M Series C raise in 2021.
Qwilt
Qwilt builds the Open Edge Cloud - a federated CDN embedded inside service provider networks (Verizon, BT, Vodafone, Comcast, Telecom Italia and dozens more) that pushes video, software, and real-time applications closer to the end user than any traditional cloud. Founded in 2010 by ex-Cisco and ex-Juniper engineers, it operates 2,196 edge nodes across 38 countries on 6 continents with 150+ Tbps of edge capacity, and is the leading commercial champion of the Open Caching standard inside the Streaming Video Technology Alliance.
Selector
Selector is an AI-powered network and infrastructure observability platform founded by ex-Juniper Networks executives. It combines a network-specific large language model, knowledge graphs, and causal reasoning to ingest telemetry from across complex hybrid environments, cut alert noise, surface root cause, and reduce mean time to resolution for telecoms, cloud providers, and global enterprises.
Vasili Triant
Vasili Triant is the CEO of UJET, an AI-powered cloud contact center platform backed by $183M in funding and built on Google Cloud. With over 20 years spanning Cisco, Serenova, LiveOps, and ShoreTel, he has navigated virtually every inflection point in enterprise communications - from on-premise PBX to cloud-native AI. Appointed sole CEO in April 2025 after serving as CBO, COO, and Co-CEO, Triant now leads UJET's push to reshape customer experience with agentic AI orchestration, deep CRM integration, and a mobile-first architecture that treats the smartphone as the default CX channel.
Stealth Communications
Stealth Communications is a New York City fiber-optic internet provider that has been quietly digging up Manhattan streets since 1995 to lay its own dark fiber, build its own routers, and sell ultrafast, dedicated business internet to enterprises, schools, broadcasters and government agencies.
Frédérique Dame
Frédérique Dame is a General Partner at GV (Google Ventures), where she leads investments in consumer technology, life sciences, and AI. A French immigrant who moved to Silicon Valley at 24, she built her career as a product and engineering leader at Yahoo!, Photobucket, SmugMug, and Uber — where she helped scale the company from 80 employees to 7,000+ across 68 countries. At GV she co-leads the Women's Health investment team and has backed companies including Midi Health, Found, Allara, Oula Health, and TMRW. She serves on the board of Les Mills International and previously on Ubisoft's board, and was named to Rock Health's Top 50 in Digital Health.
Bassel Ojjeh
Bassel Ojjeh is the CEO and co-founder of LigaData, a Menlo Park-based data platform company specializing in AI-powered telecom analytics and big data infrastructure. A Syrian-American serial entrepreneur, Ojjeh previously co-founded digiMine (behavioral targeting pioneer, later Audience Science), DMX Group (acquired by Yahoo, where he served as SVP), and nPario (big data platform). He also co-founded Syria's first English-language private university and SYNC, the first international tech conference held in Syria in 50 years, working to bridge Silicon Valley with Damascus.
Cardi Prinzi
Cardi Prinzi is the Chief Executive Officer of Sail Internet, a Bay Area fiber and fixed-wireless ISP serving residential and business customers across Silicon Valley and San Francisco. With more than 30 years of senior leadership in telecommunications - spanning Sprint, MCI Worldcom, Equinix, TelePacific, New Edge Networks, EarthLink, Pacnet, Telstra, and Windstream Enterprise - Prinzi brings deep expertise in strategic vision, product development, and revenue growth to one of the region's most customer-focused internet providers. Since joining Sail Internet in 2024, she has overseen a period of significant expansion including the acquisitions of Paxio Residential, Paxio MDU, and Ether Web Network, plus a high-profile partnership with Twist Broadband.
Ed Meyercord
Ed Meyercord is President, CEO, and Director of Extreme Networks (NASDAQ: EXTR), a publicly traded enterprise networking company with 2,700 employees and over $1.1 billion in annual revenue. He took the helm in April 2015 after serving as Chairman of the board since 2011, steering Extreme from a hardware-centric also-ran into a cloud-managed, AI-native networking platform. Under his watch the company now powers the wireless networks at Old Trafford, the Burj Khalifa, Taylor Swift concert tours, and Samsung's global operations, while its SaaS ARR has grown dramatically. Before Extreme, Meyercord ran Talk America (a publicly traded telco), Cavalier Telephone, and Critical Alert Systems, after starting his career as an investment banking VP at Salomon Brothers. He is also known for bringing improv comedy principles into corporate leadership and for his advocacy for people with intellectual disabilities through SKIT Programs.
James Graham
James Graham is the founder and CEO of Community Phone, a San Francisco-based telecommunications company that replaces traditional landlines with a cell-tower-connected device requiring no internet. Backed by Y Combinator, recognized in Forbes 30 Under 30, and a Thiel Fellow, Graham built Community Phone after watching his grandmother get sold a $1,000 phone she didn't need by a major carrier. The company now serves 25,000+ customers across all 50 U.S. states with no contracts, no hidden fees, and a 3-year price lock - principles that mirror Graham's belief that technology should serve people, not exploit them.
John Grady
John Grady is the CEO of Ayla Networks, a San Jose-based IoT and smart home software platform that powers over 15 million connected devices and 250 billion annual transactions for brands like SharkNinja, De'Longhi, Canadian Tire, and Schneider Electric. A Boston College and Indiana University Kelley School of Business graduate with 20+ years in technology sales and operations, Grady rose through roles at Brown Brothers Harriman, Covad Communications, Pace PLC, ChargePoint, and Solar Mosaic before joining Ayla in January 2022 as Head of Global Sales and ascending to CEO in 2024. Under his leadership, Ayla was ranked the #1 US-based Smart Home Platform by ABI Research and announced a major Google Cloud partnership in April 2025.
Nathan Patrick
Nathan Patrick is the Chief Executive Officer of Sonic, a California-based fiber internet provider that has been challenging the telecom duopoly since 1994. A career network engineer turned executive, Patrick rose through the ranks to CTO before taking the helm as CEO in 2024. He won the 2016 FTTXcellence Award for his technical leadership and has spearheaded Sonic's aggressive expansion beyond its Bay Area roots into Oakland, Los Angeles, and Dallas - backed by the belief that fast, honest internet shouldn't be a luxury.
Mike Promotico
Mike Promotico is the President and CEO of ProTelesis Corporation, a San Diego-based managed IT services provider he has helped build into a West Coast powerhouse over 37+ years in telecommunications. Starting as a principal at INet Corp in 1987 and helping grow it into one of North America's largest Mitel resellers, Promotico has spent three decades bridging the gap between traditional telecom and modern IT - co-founding Technology Assurance Group, leading Standard Tel Networks, and ultimately guiding ProTelesis through eight strategic acquisitions including the 2025 cyber-physical convergence play with Amer-X Security. Under his leadership, ProTelesis manages over 100,000 endpoints for more than 10,000 customers across the U.S.