What's Up with Tech?
Tech Transformation with Evan Kirstel: A podcast exploring the latest trends and innovations in the tech industry, and how businesses can leverage them for growth, diving into the world of B2B, discussing strategies, trends, and sharing insights from industry leaders!
With over three decades in telecom and IT, I've mastered the art of transforming social media into a dynamic platform for audience engagement, community building, and establishing thought leadership. My approach isn't about personal brand promotion but about delivering educational and informative content to cultivate a sustainable, long-term business presence. I am the leading content creator in areas like Enterprise AI, UCaaS, CPaaS, CCaaS, Cloud, Telecom, 5G and more!
What's Up with Tech?
What happens when AI meets the arcane world of enterprise networking?
Interested in being a guest? Email us at admin@evankirstel.com
Telecom procurement has remained stubbornly rooted in spreadsheets, emails, and manual workflows – even as enterprises spend millions on critical network infrastructure. But what happens when modern AI technology meets this arcane industry?
Dennis Thankachan founder and CEO of Lightyear, takes us on a fascinating journey from hedge fund investing to building what he calls "the telecom operating system for the enterprise." After becoming obsessed with the telecom sector's untapped potential, Dennis discovered large companies were managing tens or hundreds of millions in annual telecom spend with painfully outdated tools and processes. This revelation sparked the creation of Lightyear – a platform that digitizes and automates the entire telecom lifecycle.
The conversation explores how Lightyear's proprietary dataset, built from thousands of telecom RFPs, provides unprecedented visibility into market trends like bandwidth price inflation and the FCC-mandated replacement of traditional copper phone lines. We discuss the profound impact of AI on enterprise networking needs and management approaches, with Dennis revealing how Lightyear helps customers save over 20% on costs and 70% on time spent managing telecom services.
What makes this discussion particularly valuable is the rare window it provides into an industry that touches everything yet remains mysterious to most. Whether you're managing enterprise infrastructure, interested in AI's practical business applications, or simply curious about how the digital backbone of commerce is evolving, you'll come away with fresh insights into telecom's hidden complexities and emerging solutions. Check out Lightyear's State of Connectivity 2025 report on their website to learn more about the trends shaping enterprise networking.
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Hey, everyone, Super excited for this chat today as we dive into how AI is changing everything in telecom and infrastructure procurement, among many other things, with an innovator in this space at Lightyear Dennis. How are you?
Speaker 1:Doing well, evan, thanks for having me on for having me on Well, thanks for being here and really excited for this chat. As someone who's lived and worked in the telecom world for 35 years, it's amazing how much has changed and how much has not changed. So that's a topic of interest today. Before that, maybe introduce yourself a little bit about your bio background journey and what's the big idea behind Lightyear background journey and what's the big idea behind Lightyear?
Speaker 2:Sure, once again, my name is Dennis Dungachin and I'm the CEO and founder at Lightyear, where we are building what we call the telecom operating system for the enterprise. I've had a passion for building technology things since I was a kid. I used to program games, websites and was always sort of finding ways to make money on the internet since I was in middle school and I eventually decided that this startup thing was pretty interesting when I went to college.
Speaker 2:After college I started my career doing investment banking at Goldman Sachs and I eventually worked at a $10 billion hedge fund trading public stocks where I spent a lot of time investing in telecom companies, in internet companies and in enterprise software and I became a huge telecom nerd and actually just fell in love with the space because it felt like a sector that was unexciting to folks.
Speaker 2:That actually should have been exciting, just given the size of the sector and the amount of slept on compounder businesses in the space. So I quit that hedge fund job with nothing lined up but with the desire to start a company, exploring a few ideas in telecom and after just spending some time in the space I discovered that the business telecom market was a lot larger than I thought as an external observer, and that it was also much more arcane than I had thought. Large enterprises were spending tens or hundreds of millions of dollars a year on telecom, but they were buying and managing their networks with spreadsheets, emails and hordes of people even going into today, and basically came up with the idea that if you could digitize all of this, you could create a lot of value for the enterprise within a big and impactful TAM, and that would be a very exciting company to build, and that's what eventually became Lightyear.
Speaker 1:Wow, what a fantastic story. So fast forward to today. How would you describe what Lightyear does exactly?
Speaker 2:So, once again, lightyear is what we call the telecom operating system, and what that means is we have built workflow software for mid to large enterprise that digitizes and automates the entire telecom life cycle, from RFP creation to inventory, to bill payment to renewal. And when I say telecom just cause that is a word that can mean a lot of things these days I mean your ISP services, like your internet connections, wan circuits, your phone systems, your co-location or data center space, power and services, and underlying our software are three core products. So first we have Lightyear's procurement, which utilizes our network and pricing intelligence to optimize your telecom RFPs quoting and install management. We have our network inventory manager, which basically establishes a digital system of record for your enterprise network tracking core enterprise network data points, keeping things accurate across your enterprise systems via API and automating things like service ticketing and rebidding services prior to renewal to make sure you're getting the best price.
Speaker 2:Finally, we have our bill consolidation service. This takes the pain out of telecom invoice payment and invoice auditing. We'll digitize all your telecom invoices, make sure you're paying the right amounts and get these paid for you. So you add all of this up and enterprises who leverage Lightyear today save over 20% on their telecom costs On average is what we see and over 70% of the time they'd spend managing all this stuff, which is just a lot of really painful grunt work man hours and today we have over 350 enterprise customers. We've raised over $50 million in funding and we're working with companies like Okta, palo Alto Networks, alo Yoga, five Guys, roadrunner and many more.
Speaker 1:Wow, what a fantastic opportunity here and maybe describe the current state of play, because it's quite fragmented Best practices, if you call them, that have been around for decades. I guess they call it telecom expense management. So what's the big leap forward that you're managing to take here?
Speaker 2:Sure, so, basically, in terms of what we've done, the way I'd put it is people think about telecom as a really really slow moving, archaic space, and that's actually correct, which makes building a product in the space really, really hard. What I say internally is that telecoms lack of innovation is sort of our opportunity. If the big telcos made life easy for customers with digital interfaces and easy way to buy things and all that stuff, there'd just be no point in building Lightyear. So it's been the case that this is sort of a double-edged sword for us On the negative end. To start with that, building Lightyear has been a goddamn pain. It's a difficult product to build because you can't just plug into provider APIs or telecom APIs, pull the info and send a digital signal and then have someone buy a circuit and have a product like ours just work like magic.
Speaker 2:We've had to undergo a very slow, tedious and painful grind to build Lightyear and that's sort of our opportunity. We've built out all of these methods to collect data from the telcos and automate actually all of these different workflows and standardize them for all the big providers as well as hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of small providers, and we've built out partnerships and integrations with all these providers so that we can quote, we can manage installs, we can place tickets on your behalf all of that in ways that are very difficult to replicate for another business. You can't just give $10 million to another Stanford grad and have them go and build out this business. And we've been able to create a lot of value for both the enterprises and also for the telcos as well, because they're having a happier customer on the other side. And now the new state of play, of course, is AI, which allows us to automate and digitize all of these workflows that were previously areas where humans would have to intervene as well.
Speaker 1:Fantastic. Well, let's talk about AI. It's changing everything, as you know no-transcript.
Speaker 2:The enterprise network in two ways One is the look and feel of the network itself and its various components, and then two is how the network is managed, which is where we play it. So on the actual network architecture side, utilization of AI makes infrastructure design much more important. Enterprises need to use a lot more bandwidth. They're adding more nodes to their overall network. They're computing more at the edge and outside of the public cloud more often. So we see them creating their own private clouds or utilizing data centers collocation space to manage and host their own custom AI workloads, which puts a lot of pressure on IT teams to procure more quickly, to care more about uptime and how they manage the network, to care more about diversity and redundancy and to vet for higher bandwidth.
Speaker 2:Of course, on the network operation side, enterprises are now more open to using AI tooling to optimize network management via AI. So, of course, on the procurement and vendor management, lightyear is the core component of that. You know we're actually really the only startup out there that's utilizing AI to optimize how you manage procurement and vendors of the network itself. We're also seeing networking teams use software to proactively troubleshoot their networks, to effectively self-manage their network, to sort of like take in analytics and self-heal if that makes sense, and there are a variety of exciting startups in and around that space as well and network monitoring, so that's heating up as well. So I'm very excited to see what comes of developments in that area.
Speaker 1:Fantastic. So you've got a unique front row seat to all the trends and opportunities hitting the enterprise. I mean, when I started in the 90s, telecom was pretty much, you know, buying POTS lines or T1s, maybe some pagers and voicemail, and that was the portfolio, of course. Now you've got UCAS and CCAS and IoT devices and 5G and all of these emerging technologies. Saas hits the telecom industry. How deep and wide do you go into this portfolio? What are the trends that you're seeing with those enterprises? Yeah, so we cover everything.
Speaker 2:You know you're talking about POTS lines from the 90s. The interesting thing is that, beginning in 2022, the FCC is now mandating that enterprises get rid of their POTS lines. So you know what was in the 80s and 90s? Enterprises rolling out POTS lines and T1s. Now enterprises are actually vetting a bunch of technical solutions to get off of their POTS line. So you know, one big trend is enterprises evaluating either LTE or internet-based what you'd call POTS in a box solutions that allow them to get the benefit like the regulatory needs of POTS lines because there are a variety of regulatory requirements that force certain enterprises to have POTS lines and replace them with a non copper based solutions. That's that's a thing that we are working on.
Speaker 2:You know, one other interesting trend that we see that's pretty salient for pretty much every enterprise that buys connectivity is around inflation in bandwidth pricing.
Speaker 2:So at Lightyear we run thousands and thousands and thousands of network RFPs all day, every day. So we have what we've cobbled together is the best proprietary data set in business telecom that continuously grows as time passes and typically year over year, almost extremely consistently. You see telecom cost deflation of 5 to 10 percent. Basically, the cost per megabit of bandwidth you're paying is going down year over year and over the past year in the US we saw costs stagnate, which is actually pretty meaningful inflation relative to the historical trend, and in certain international markets we saw cost inflation of 5% to 10% on a cost per meg basis for bandwidth and it's hard to pinpoint the cause of this, but it's likely related to a lag impact of all the supply chain disruptions and inflation from the post-COVID timeframe in beginning to impact telecom because, of course, a bunch of specialized hardware and construction are core cost inputs to telecom services. That's a very interesting trend we've seen.
Speaker 2:I have a bunch more trends that I'll comment on. We've actually published a state of connectivity 2025 report. So if you go to lightyearai and under our resources section, there's an ebook state of connectivity.
Speaker 2:So you can read a bunch more about cost inflation pots in a box, all of these sorts of things, because we write on it pretty frequently.
Speaker 1:Amazing what a great data set you have there. So you mentioned benefits. Obviously, cost savings is a key one, but describe some of the other benefits that are really compelling for your customers.
Speaker 2:Yeah, of course. So when customers get excited about Lightyear, I think cost savings is what brings people in before they use the product. But then they use the product and it's really the soft cost and automation savings and just taking away the painful workflows of managing telecom and automating them that keeps our customers happy. So you know, we say you'd save over 70 percent of the time you'd spend on telecom management, in addition to significant cost savings. So you know a few core benefits.
Speaker 2:With streamlined procurement you'll get ideal vendor solutions, always matched based on your sort of technical specifications, diversity, requirements, etc. Based on our data set at the best possible rates for those particular solutions, driven by our proprietary network and pricing intelligence. And that intelligence actually gets better over time as we run more and more and more RPs for more enterprises. With an organized network inventory, you can streamline solutions to issues like outages or network troubleshooting if you face them. You can place tickets on your network digitally. You can move and disconnect your services with clicks rather than phone calls and ensure you're paying the right rates for only utilized services at renewal. And with automated invoice management and bill payment you can ensure that you're paying the right rates and avoiding outages due to nonpayment or late fees with Lightyear.
Speaker 1:Wow, that's fantastic. I mean, telecom billing is another chaotic mess for many people. I mean, I have a small business, not an enterprise, but I haven't looked at my telecom billing years so I'm not even sure what's going on there. How can you help sort of untangle the wires pun intended and bring transparency to billing the wires pun intended and bring transparency to billing?
Speaker 2:Yeah, so this is another core use case for AI. Once we've ingested your network inventory, we'll actually become the bill payer of record for all your services. So you pay us one monthly bill and we'll handle everything on the back end. And what we do is we'll ingest all your invoices digitally and we can utilize AI to digitize, categorize and audit all of your telecom line items and create that simple monthly invoice but also stay on top of major billing variances or billing issues and open disputes on your behalf to make sure your bills are paid accurately but also that you're billed correctly. And, of course, you know you noted the pains you face as a small business. You can only imagine we're working with enterprises that have thousands upon thousands of services and then tens or hundreds of thousands of line items.
Speaker 1:I bet so you know you're taking such a proactive approach to telecom procurement. Is this, you know, the new model? Do you think this sort of proactive, intelligent, ai-driven approach? How do the procurement managers think about what you're doing and how is their role changing on the people side of the equation?
Speaker 2:Well, you know, I think what you always see is that enterprise trends lag consumer trends by a bit and at the enterprise today, the procurement leaders or the IT leaders of today that we deal with are leaders that grew up in the age of Amazon, in the age of Uber, in the age of the internet, and expect that consumer-like experience for how they handle enterprise procurement, which historically has been plagued by paper pushing and order forms and this and that, and a lot of the software historically that procurement managers or IT managers have been forced to use feels more like the consumer experience pre the internet, sort of like digitized paper pushing, I would put it, and the other recent megatread that compounds this is AI and AI driven procurement across the enterprise is all the rage.
Speaker 2:So, you know, when you combine these two, theses Lightyear is really the way that this plays out in enterprise telecom, but I think it's playing out in every subset of the enterprise we will give you that consumer-like digital and AI-driven experience within procurement and we'll automate and allow you to do with fewer hands what previously required hordes of people and hordes of time, and we'll also ensure that you're utilizing data to make the best objective decisions for your enterprise, that your vendors are held accountable for the rates they give you, how they manage installations, the experience they give you, and that you're always, on an automated basis, on top of your vendor changes, your renewal dates, et cetera, et cetera and the like.
Speaker 1:Wow, interesting. So tell us more about how the telcos themselves are reacting both to this opportunity. I guess some see it as an opportunity to embrace, but I imagine others are less enthralled by the approach. And how can telcos, maybe beyond your remit, but innovate more and do more with advanced services and revenue generation than they have in the past, which is, you know, been mixed, to say the least?
Speaker 2:Yeah, well, you know the telcos are our friends too, because, of course, they are our partners and in the context of the marketplace component of our business, for vendors to be sorry, for our customers to succeed, the telcos also have to succeed in delivering an excellent customer experience.
Speaker 2:And we bring the telcos customers.
Speaker 2:We also bring them valuable data and feedback on why they lose deals, why they win deals when customers are happy, when customers are unhappy, and we do so in an objective, data-oriented manner.
Speaker 2:So, in terms of the telcos, for one, when we bring them business, they're very happy, but when they lose business with us, we give them valuable information on how to go about winning more business, and we've had actually a variety of partnerships that we've been able to turn around, where telcos have been able to adjust how they interface with Lightyear to win more business on the platform, which is great for them.
Speaker 2:But also all of the changes they make result in a better customer experience, either pricing more competitively, providing a better install experience, providing a better customer experience. So we view ourselves as sort of like the data aggregation layer that can make the market more efficient by translating customer demand and customer objectives into vendor changes and vendor optimization, also in terms of vendors working with us. We've gotten a lot of adoption of the digital tooling we've built to automate quoting, to automate install management and all of these things from the telcos. And also we've been a thought partner from the telcos, for the telcos rather, on how to digitize their operations. So as all of these digitization trends continue to play out, we hope to be at the forefront of how that's done within telecom.
Speaker 1:Fantastic. So, looking ahead, what's next? You're doing a lot Any upcoming launches or new initiatives you're excited about.
Speaker 2:Yeah, so we have a ton of exciting product releases in the works. Since the Series B race we did last year, we have significantly grown our engineering organization and we're building a lot. So we're going to be adding in the next year a bunch more expense management functionality that we're going to announce soon. We're going to be announcing a lot more bulk procurement capabilities. So, rather than buying services on one, two, three, four, five site bases, you can buy services for 500 sites at one time. And we're also moving toward monitoring and taking action on your actual network performance via the Lightyear dashboard, and we'll be the only tool that can sort of tie your network performance to your actual underlying vendors as well.
Speaker 1:Fantastic. Well, so much to keep up with Congratulations on the great important work you're doing and good luck. Let's touch base sometime later this year.
Speaker 2:Absolutely. Thank you so much for chatting with me, Evan.
Speaker 1:Thanks, dennis, and thanks everyone for listening and watching and, in addition to this podcast, check out our new TV show on Fox Business and Bloomberg TV Tech Impact. Take care.