telecommunications
(66)
Comcast
Comcast built a $123.7 billion business by owning more of the trip from socket to screen than almost anyone else. Now it is pulling that empire apart to see whether focus can do what scale no longer does.
SoftBank Group Corp.
SoftBank began as a software wholesaler and became a telecom operator, a startup financier and now an aspiring owner of the AI stack. Its latest wager ties models, chips, data centers and robots into one capital-intensive system.
Lumen Technologies
A Louisiana telephone descendant is wagering that the most valuable layer of AI may be the glass beneath it. Lumen is turning a sprawling fiber backbone into a programmable network enterprises can switch on in minutes.
Lumentum
The AI boom has a plumbing problem: copper cannot carry every conversation between millions of chips. Lumentum is turning light into the scarce infrastructure layer - one laser, transceiver and microscopic mirror at a time.
Leslie Berland
From American Express's first tweets to Verizon's glowing V, Leslie Berland has built a career by making giant systems feel human - and by treating attention as something a brand must earn.
Geoff Hollingworth
From accelerator controls at CERN to the economics of mobile networks, Geoff Hollingworth has spent three decades asking telecom to stop confusing new technology with a new business.
Ericsson
The 149-year-old Swedish firm that helped write the rules of 5G now has to prove those networks can grow again - under a new CEO and an AI-driven cost squeeze.
Nine Fives
Nine Fives builds modern radio-frequency (RF) test equipment for manufacturers of wireless devices in cellphones, drones, and satellites. Founded by two former SpaceX engineers, the company replaces slow, driver-heavy legacy instruments with driverless, touchscreen, network-connected modules that share a single machine-readable API (REST and SCPI) and ship AI-readable documentation. The pitch: get RF test off the critical path and cut a hardware team's production-readiness timeline from months to minutes.
InMobiles Holding
InMobiles Holding is a Dubai-headquartered information and communications technology (ICT) provider founded in 2006. It supplies mobile network operators, telecom regulators and enterprises with A2P SMS messaging hubs, next-generation SMS firewalls, value-added services (VAS), roaming, fintech, KYC and revenue-assurance solutions, alongside consumer apps such as the NumberBook caller-ID service. A GSMA associate member and former ISAG board member, InMobiles reports more than 235 international installations and reach across the Middle East, Africa, Europe, Asia and the Americas.
SiteSee
SiteSee is a Brisbane-founded software company that builds AI-powered digital twins of telecommunications infrastructure. By combining drone capture, photogrammetry and machine-learning audit engines, it turns survey-grade imagery of cell towers and rooftops into interactive 3D models that tower companies and mobile network operators can inspect, measure and upgrade from a desk - cutting site visits, speeding colocation approvals and helping owners get more value from their assets.
Nrby, Inc.
Nrby is a New Hampshire-based AI software company that turns raw network telemetry and location data into proactive action for broadband and telecom operators. Its platform - built around SmartPins, VisionAI, and the Link AI framework - shifts network operations from reactive repair to predictive prevention, guiding field technicians to the exact location of a fault and validating that work is done right the first time. Founded in 2015 by telecom veteran Kurt Dobbins, Nrby serves Tier One wireless, fiber, and broadband providers across North and South America.
Community Phone
Community Phone is a US telecommunications company that reinvents the landline for the mobile era. Its plug-and-play Landline Base connects an ordinary home phone to local cell towers, delivering dial tone without internet, copper wiring, or contracts. Founded in 2018 by James Graham after his grandmother was mis-sold an expensive cell phone, the Y Combinator-backed company offers transparent pricing, AI spam-call blocking, voicemail-to-text, and US-based human support to more than 25,000 homes and businesses - and was named Forbes' #1 Home Phone Service Provider of 2025.
CUJO AI
CUJO AI is a network intelligence and cybersecurity company that turns raw broadband network data into actionable insights for internet and mobile operators. Founded in 2015, its cloud-native platform uses machine learning to identify and classify connected devices, block malware and phishing in real time, and deliver digital life protection, parental controls and network analytics. Delivered as software to carriers rather than as consumer hardware, CUJO AI reaches more than 60 million homes and monitors billions of connected devices for operators including Comcast, Charter, TELUS, Sky and Rogers.
MightyCall
MightyCall is a San Francisco-based cloud phone and call center provider that gives small and mid-sized businesses enterprise-grade telephony - virtual numbers, IVR, call routing, recording, dialers and analytics - without an IT department or a big budget. Grown out of the Infratel call-center software group, the company now serves more than 10,000 organizations across the US and Canada on a self-funded, subscription model.
OpenClovis
OpenClovis is a Petaluma, California infrastructure-software company that builds SAFplus, a carrier-grade high-availability middleware platform for telecom, networking, and defense equipment. Its libraries, GUI tools, and code generators let engineers design multi-node clustered applications with sub-second fault detection and failover, targeting the 99.999% (five-nines) uptime demanded by network operators. Founded in 2002 and offered under a dual open-source (GPL) and commercial license, SAFplus has been used in deployments by companies including Sonus, HP, Ericsson, NASA, and Lockheed Martin.
Michael Wei
Michael Wei is the CEO of Accelight Technologies, a Pleasanton, California ODM that designs and manufactures optical transceivers, EDFA amplifiers, and passive fiber components for telecom carriers and AI data centers. He is an electrical engineer with three decades in the trenches of optical networking hardware, with earlier stops at Mitel, ADVA Optical Networking, Adaptix, Navini Networks, Schlumberger, and Invocon.
Cox Enterprises
Cox Enterprises is a privately held, family-owned conglomerate based in Atlanta, Georgia, that traces its roots to a single Ohio newspaper bought by James M. Cox in 1898. Over more than a century it grew into a roughly $23 billion-a-year business spanning broadband and cable (Cox Communications), automotive services and marketplaces (Cox Automotive, which owns Autotrader, Kelley Blue Book and Manheim), and media (Cox Media Group and Axios). Still controlled by the Cox family and led by fourth-generation CEO Alex Taylor, the company reinvests its cash into new bets such as greenhouse agriculture, advanced plastics recycling and healthcare, while pursuing an aggressive Cox Conserves goal to be carbon and water neutral by 2034.
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.
SCTE® a subsidiary of CableLabs®
SCTE is the non-profit professional society that trains, certifies, and sets the technical standards for the people who build and run cable broadband networks. Founded in 1969 and a subsidiary of CableLabs since 2021, it runs the only ANSI-accredited standards program for the broadband industry, issues role-based professional certifications, delivers online and hands-on technical education, and hosts SCTE TechExpo (formerly Cable-Tec Expo), the largest cable telecommunications event in the Americas. In short: if a technician splices a fiber, proctors a DOCSIS install, or writes a Remote PHY spec, SCTE is usually the reason there's a shared playbook.
Jeff Gower
Jeff Gower is the CEO of MarketSpark, the Bannockburn, Illinois company betting that the millions of copper phone lines humming inside American buildings are on borrowed time. Since 2020 he has led the enterprise POTS-replacement business, swapping static, costly analog lines for managed 4G/5G-ready wireless that keeps elevators, fire alarms and fax machines talking after the copper is gone. An engineer by training with an MIT Sloan MBA, Gower spent two decades scaling mobility and B2B services businesses across the globe - Siemens Mobile, Brightstar, Samsung Electronics and Trux - before turning the unglamorous plumbing of enterprise telecom into a growth story backed by a $7M Series B.
Maria Popo
Maria Popo is the president and CEO of SCTE, a subsidiary of CableLabs, and the first woman to hold the top job at the cable industry's standards and training body. A self-described lifelong learner who started as a customer service rep and trained at a trade school, she rose through technical and executive roles at 3M, 3Com, Ambit Microsystems, Foxconn and Ubee Interactive - where she helped bring the first generations of cable modems to market - before earning a master's in Learning Design and Technology at Stanford. She now runs SCTE's global network of 60-plus chapters, retooling how the broadband industry trains and certifies its workforce for the AI era.
Polaris Wireless
Polaris Wireless is a Silicon Valley company that pinpoints where a mobile phone is - not just on a map, but on which floor of a building. Founded in 1999, it pioneered software-based Wireless Location Signatures (WLS) and high-accuracy 3D / z-axis location, technology used by wireless carriers and public safety agencies so that when someone dials 911 from the 30th floor, responders know which floor. With 90+ patents and 50+ deployments worldwide, Polaris turns radio noise into vertical certainty for E911, IoT, smart cities and enterprise applications.
ProTelesis Corporation
ProTelesis Corporation is a San Diego-based managed services provider (MSP/MSSP) born from the 2019 merger of two California telecom heavyweights - Protel (a leading Mitel Blue dealer) and Xtelesis (a leading Mitel Orange dealer). The company has evolved from a traditional phone-system business into a full-stack technology partner delivering managed IT, cybersecurity, unified communications, cloud, structured cabling, and managed detection and response. With offices across California, the Pacific Northwest, Utah, and Bangalore, it supports thousands of clients and hundreds of thousands of endpoints, with a focus on biotech, defense, and growing small-to-midsize businesses.
Sonic
Sonic is the largest independently owned internet service provider in California, founded in 1994 in Santa Rosa. It builds and runs its own fiber-optic network, selling fast, flat-priced gigabit and 10-gigabit home and business internet with no contracts, no data caps, and a privacy stance that has earned it a perfect score from the Electronic Frontier Foundation. After more than 30 years serving the San Francisco Bay Area, Sonic began its first out-of-region expansion in 2026, lighting up fiber in Los Angeles and Dallas.
TEECOM
TEECOM is a technology planning, design, and engineering firm that makes technology work in buildings. Founded in 1997 and led by founder David Marks, the remote-first company partners with architecture, engineering, and construction (AEC) teams to design the unseen layer of modern buildings - structured cabling, networks, audiovisual, acoustics, security, wireless, distributed antenna systems, and emergency responder radio. With 150-plus engineers, designers, and subject-matter experts, TEECOM has delivered integrated technology systems across more than 28 countries for clients like Salesforce.
teleSys Software, Inc.
teleSys Software is a San Mateo boutique telecom firm that has quietly kept the world's phone calls and texts connected since 1997. It builds carrier-grade signaling software - the invisible traffic-control layer that routes 2G, 3G, 4G, and 5G networks - including Diameter Signaling Controllers, SS7/SIGTRAN transfer points, signaling firewalls, and 5G SCPs. Its MACH7 product line runs in 400+ installations across 100+ operators worldwide, serving more than 500 million subscribers through the major Tier 1 carriers.
TeraHop
TeraHop is an optical solutions provider building high-speed optical transceivers and modules for AI clusters and data centers. Operating from Singapore, San Jose, Thailand and a new Texas plant, it ships 400G, 800G, 1.6T and emerging 12.8T-class optics. As the international-facing arm of Zhongji InnoLight - the world's largest optical-transceiver maker - TeraHop pairs high-volume manufacturing with R&D partnerships across NVIDIA, Marvell and Corning, and in 2025-2026 raised roughly US$517M with backing from Abu Dhabi's ADIA and Singapore's Temasek.
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.
Vianet Communication
Vianet Communication is one of Nepal's leading internet and TV service providers. Founded in 1999, it pioneered fiber-to-the-home (FTTH) internet in the country in 2011 and launched one of Nepal's first IPTV services in 2016. Headquartered in Lalitpur, the company serves roughly 260,000 fiber customers across 24 cities, holds about 10% national market share as the third-largest ISP, and in 2023 launched Nepal's first 2 Gbps XGS-PON multi-gig internet service.
Zayo Group
Zayo Group is a Denver-based communications infrastructure company that owns and operates one of North America and Europe's largest fiber-optic networks - over 150,000 route miles after its 2026 acquisition of Crown Castle's fiber business. It sells the physical layer of the internet: dark fiber, wavelengths, Ethernet, IP transit, dedicated internet access, colocation and managed edge services to wireless carriers, hyperscalers, enterprises, governments and ISPs. Founded in 2007 on a contrarian bet that bandwidth demand would only explode, Zayo has spent its life buying and building fiber, and is now positioning that network as the backbone for AI workloads moving data between data centers.