Introducing Lightyear at Networking Field Day 40

Automate Enterprise Network Management with Lightyear’s Telecom Operating System

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Buying and managing enterprise network services has barely changed in decades–carrier portals, spreadsheets, blind renewals, and invoices that never match the contract. Lightyear is building an AI software platform that modernizes the enterprise telecom lifecycle, automating and optimizing for you everything that carriers make difficult. Dennis Thankachan, CEO and co-founder, explains that telecom operations are traditionally manual and lack the digitization necessary for objective data-driven decisions. Lightyear addresses this by offering a telecom operating system that integrates procurement, network inventory management, and expense management into a single, automated system of action. This approach allows enterprises to move away from error-prone spreadsheets toward a digital system of record that streamlines RFPs, installation management, and continuous cost optimization.

The platform’s three core pillars work together to handle the entire lifecycle of network services. The procurement module uses proprietary network and pricing intelligence to conduct digital RFPs, ensuring customers find the best vendors and price points across more than a thousand providers globally. Once a service is selected, the inventory manager tracks over 30 unique data points, including contract details, SLAs, and configuration data, while automating lifecycle tasks like renewal shopping and ticketing. For the final stage, the expense management module acts as an AI-native tool for auditing invoices, capturing billing variances, and managing consolidated payments, which typically results in significant time and cost savings for mid-market and enterprise customers.

Lightyear plans to expand its capabilities with new AI-driven features and a circuit monitoring pillar. CTO Ryan Schrack notes that the company is integrating natural language processing to allow users to query their network data intuitively and extract unique insights via custom charts and reports. The roadmap includes “software that’s actually soft,” meaning highly customizable workflows that adapt to an enterprise’s specific needs for quote selection and implementation. By potentially adding low-integration monitoring for uptime and capacity, Lightyear aims to provide a truly comprehensive system that not only buys and tracks services but also provides actionable intelligence on how the network is performing in real-time.

Personnel: Dennis Thankachan, Ryan Schrack

Lightyear Demo of Procurement, Network Inventory Manager, and Telecom Expense Management (TEM)

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Buying and managing enterprise network services has barely changed in decades–carrier portals, spreadsheets, blind renewals, and invoices that never match the contract. Lightyear is building an AI software platform that modernizes the enterprise telecom lifecycle, automating and optimizing for you everything that carriers make difficult. The platform serves as a telecom operating system designed to digitize the full lifecycle of a service, from procurement and installation to inventory management and expense auditing. By replacing manual workflows with a centralized system of action, Lightyear enables enterprises to configure complex requests, such as internet circuits or high-capacity waves, in a matter of seconds, leveraging location intelligence to identify the best on-net vendors and market-aligned pricing.

The platform significantly simplifies the transition from procurement to active service through dedicated install project management software. This system acts as a “squeaky wheel” to keep carriers on schedule, providing detailed visibility into job steps, estimated completion dates, and escalation paths. Once a service is live, it is automatically cataloged in the Network Inventory Manager, which tracks over 30 unique data points per circuit, including SLAs, static IPs, and physical KMZ route maps. This digital system of record not only visualizes the entire network on a map but also automates lifecycle workflows such as MACD (Move, Add, Change, Disconnect) ticketing and proactive shopping, ensuring that services do not lapse into expensive month-to-month rates or auto-renew without oversight.

The final pillar of the platform is an AI-native expense management engine that uses Large Language Models (LLMs) and Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) to audit complex telecom invoices. This tool itemizes every charge, distinguishing contracted service costs from government surcharges and taxes, and automatically flags billing variances such as inactive services still being billed or unexpected fee increases. When discrepancies are found, Lightyear’s team can resolve disputes directly with carriers, providing finance teams with clean, exportable data and the option for a single consolidated monthly bill. Integrated messaging and a global calendar of deadlines further bridge the gap between network engineering and procurement, turning telecom management into a streamlined, automated operation.

Personnel: Dennis Thankachan, Ryan Schrack