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 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.
TeamLogic IT is a North American managed IT services provider that operates as a franchise network of locally owned, nationally backed offices. It delivers managed IT, cybersecurity, cloud, business continuity and IT consulting to small and mid-sized businesses, pairing on-the-ground local owners with enterprise-grade tools, 24/7 monitoring and a virtual-CIO advisory model. Founded in 2004 and owned by Franchise Services, Inc., the brand has grown to roughly 300+ locations and is consistently ranked among the world's top MSPs.
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.
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.
Voximplant is a cloud communications and voice AI orchestration platform that lets developers and enterprises add programmable voice, video, messaging and AI agents to their apps without managing telecom infrastructure. Spun out of click-to-call pioneer Zingaya, it powers billions of calls a year for brands like Hyundai, Burger King, KFC, Glovo and Rappi.
Dror Nahumi is a General Partner at Norwest Venture Partners, a multi-stage global VC firm managing $15.5 billion in assets. Based in Menlo Park, California, he leads Norwest's Israeli investment portfolio - a practice he helped build since the firm established its Israel presence in 2009. A former Bell Labs research engineer who developed the RCELP speech coder (now the CDMA standard for North American cellular), Nahumi transitioned from deep tech to entrepreneurship before landing in venture capital in 2010. He has backed companies that have been acquired by Microsoft, Google, EMC, and Symantec, and has seeded unicorns including Gong.io, VAST Data, and Weka.
PanTerra Networks is a San Jose-based UCaaS provider that bundles voice, video, messaging, file sharing and an AI contact center into one cloud platform called Streams.AI. Founded in 2001 by Silicon Valley engineer Arthur Chang, the company sells to mid-market businesses that want one vendor instead of five, and points to a 99.999% uptime record and HIPAA-compliant SmartBox file sharing as its main differentiators.
Spruce Health is an all-in-one, HIPAA-compliant communication platform built for healthcare practices. It rolls calls, voicemails, texts, secure messages, fax, video visits and team chat into a single inbox so clinicians can talk to patients - and to each other - without juggling six different apps.
Derek Ting is the co-founder and CEO of TextNow, the Waterloo-based company he started in 2009 at age 19 with classmate Jon Lerner while studying computer engineering at the University of Waterloo. What began as a scrappy solution to outrageous carrier text messaging fees has grown into the only U.S. mobile provider offering unlimited talk, text, and free essential data on a nationwide 5G network. The TextNow app has been downloaded more than 200 million times worldwide, making Derek one of the most consequential quiet disruptors in American telecommunications - building a profitable, venture-light company that serves millions of users who can't afford traditional phone service.
Dmitri Lepikhov is the CEO of MightyCall, a San Francisco-based cloud call center and VoIP platform built for small and mid-sized businesses. Since taking the helm in 2015, he has grown the company by over 500%, landed it on the Inc. 5000, and earned recognition from the U.S. Chamber of Commerce as one of America's most innovative small businesses. A CPA by training with roots in auditing and corporate finance at firms like Deloitte and Severstal, Lepikhov has positioned MightyCall as a G2 Leader in Contact Center Solutions and expanded its engineering footprint to Tashkent, Uzbekistan.
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.
Michael Gold is the Chairman and CEO of Intermedia Intelligent Communications, a Sunnyvale-based AI-powered cloud communications company serving over 150,000 businesses through a network of 7,500 channel partners. Since co-leading Intermedia's acquisition in 2011, Gold has grown the company's revenues and profits more than 7x, transforming it from a hosted email provider into a comprehensive UCaaS and CCaaS platform. A Stanford MBA and electrical engineer by training, Gold is a veteran cloud services operator who previously founded Zlago, led Sphera (acquired by Parallels), and served as SVP at Qwest Communications. His signature strategy - selling through partners who resell under their own brands - has made Intermedia a quiet powerhouse behind some of the biggest names in business communications.
Arthur 'Artie' Chang is the CEO and founder of PanTerra Networks, a cloud-based unified communications company he has helmed since 2001. A serial Silicon Valley entrepreneur who started his career at Bell Laboratories and took SoloPoint Communications through an IPO, Chang brings together an engineering pedigree from Northwestern and UC Berkeley with a Stanford Executive MBA. At PanTerra, he has spent over two decades building a bootstrapped challenger to the telecom giants, competing on agility and innovation rather than scale, and now driving the company's AI-powered communications platform, Streams.AI.