Lightyear at NFD40: Can Software Fix the Telecom Lifecycle?

Anyone who has managed carrier circuits for a living knows the pain. Quoting takes forever. Installs drag on with zero visibility. Renewals sneak up because everything lives in a spreadsheet that someone built four years ago and nobody trusts anymore. Invoices show up with charges that don’t match the contract, and disputing them means calling a number and sitting on hold. It’s 2026, and most enterprise telecom management still runs on email threads and Excel.

Lightyear, presented at Networking Field Day 40 by CEO Dennis Thankachan and CTO Ryan Schrack, is building what they call a “telecom operating system” to replace that mess. The pitch: a single platform that handles procurement, network inventory, and expense management for your carrier services, end to end.

Three Products, One Lifecycle

Lightyear’s platform breaks into three pieces that feed into each other.

• Procurement lets you create a telecom RFP digitally, configure the service parameters (circuit type, bandwidth, term length, provider preferences), and submit it. On the back end, Lightyear uses location and pricing intelligence to figure out which carriers are likely on-net or near-net at a given address, bids the request out to those carriers automatically, and returns pricing with details like transport type, last-mile provider, AS number, delivery point, and estimated install interval. You can compare quotes side by side. For point-to-point or wave services, they’ll pull KMZ route files from carriers and let you overlay them to check for physical path diversity, including identifying intersection points along the routes.

  Once you sign an order, the install moves into their project management tracker. Every job step, every estimated completion date, every action item that needs your attention gets surfaced in one place. Their implementations team monitors the installs and escalates with carriers when things stall. This is where they claim a lot of the time savings come from, and honestly, if you’ve ever chased a carrier install across six email threads and two different project managers who don’t talk to each other, you understand why.

• Network Inventory Manager is the system of record for your WAN services. Each circuit gets over 30 tracked data points: contract terms, SLAs, static IPs, LAN/WAN config, vendor contacts, delivery points, and custom fields. You can set per-service renewal actions (auto-renew, auto-reshop, cancel at expiration), open MACD tickets with clicks instead of phone calls, and export or sync the data via API to systems like NetBox or ServiceNow.

• Expense Management is their AI-native invoice processing layer. They ingest invoices regardless of format, use LLMs to extract and categorize line items (taxes, surcharges, actual service cost), tie each charge back to a specific inventory service, and flag variances automatically. Variances can be things like charges exceeding the contracted rate, taxes higher than expected, or billing for inactive services. They’ll chase disputes on your behalf and can handle consolidated bill payment so you’re writing one check per month instead of twenty.

Where I Pushed Back

I asked Dennis directly how this differs from a traditional telecom agent. I’ve worked with agents who managed over a thousand circuits as a single person and did a solid job of it. Dennis’s answer was that software can handle scale that a human broker can’t, particularly around systematic quoting with pricing intelligence, managing installs across hundreds of sites simultaneously, and keeping inventory current as services change. He also noted that Lightyear will quote providers that pay zero commission, which removes the incentive misalignment that’s baked into the traditional agent model where brokers benefit from keeping services billing as long as possible.

Fair points, but I’m still not fully sold that the procurement side is dramatically different from what a good agent does for a mid-sized shop. Where Lightyear’s pitch gets stronger is in the integrated lifecycle: procurement flows into inventory, inventory feeds expense management, and everything stays connected. That closed loop is hard to replicate with a human broker and a spreadsheet.

The Roadmap

Ryan Schrack talked about what’s coming in 2026. The big addition is circuit monitoring as a fourth product pillar, giving Lightyear visibility into uptime, downtime, and capacity utilization across your WAN services. Ben Story asked whether that monitoring data would come from the carriers or from on-prem collection. Ryan said it would likely be some form of software tie-in to IPs rather than relying on carrier-reported data, which is the right answer. If you’ve ever called a carrier to report a down circuit only to hear “it looks fine on our end,” you know why that matters.

They’re also layering AI across the existing platform: natural language queries against your inventory data, smarter automation in the procurement and install workflows, and the ability for customers to customize those workflows to fit their specific needs. The goal is to move from a system of record to what Ryan called a “system of action.”

Bottom Line

Lightyear is tackling a problem that is genuinely painful and mostly ignored by the networking vendor ecosystem. Nobody is excited about managing carrier contracts. Nobody wakes up wanting to audit a Lumen invoice. That’s exactly why the tooling around it has stagnated for so long.

The procurement product is free (commission-funded), and the inventory and expense management products are SaaS subscriptions. They claim 400+ enterprise customers including names like Okta, Palo Alto Networks, and Mattel.

If you’re managing more than a handful of carrier circuits and your current system involves the word “spreadsheet,” it’s worth taking a look. More information is available at lightyear.ai.

Disclaimer: As a Tech Field Day delegate, my travel and accommodations are covered by the event. However, I am not compensated for my participation, and I am under no obligation to write about any vendor or product. All opinions on this blog are my own. For more, please read my full Tech Field Day disclaimer.