telecom-software
(2)
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.
Alex Batyrev
Alex Batyrev is the President and CEO of AB Soft, a roughly 150-person software services firm headquartered in Odesa, Ukraine, with an operating presence in South San Francisco. For more than a decade his Odesa engineers have been a long-running build crew behind RingCentral's cloud communications stack. A mathematician by training, Batyrev has spent his career stitching American product ambitions to Ukrainian engineering bench depth.