It looks like everything is being pushed online now, but forced network purchases remain a topic of personal or phone-based discussion. Early in New York City, Lightair decided to make that change last year, and the company announced today in a $ 13.1 million series. Ridge Ventures led the round with the participation of Jig Capital and a number of independent investors. Today’s investment peaked at $3.7 million seed goals last October, raising a total of $ 16.8 million.
CEO and co-founder Dennis Thankachan said the company has been able to gain customers by offering a new way to raise network resources, which was a great improvement over manual negotiations. “Last year we launched Lightyear which was the first tool on the web to buy your telecom infrastructure. And while it is difficult to change behaviors and make ventures work year after year, telecom stability has been the transparency of emptiness, a web-based way of doing things and often interfering with real, truly large vendors where you have no discussions where you leverage even if you are a large enterprise. This experience was so weak that a lot of enterprises were extremely happy to see what we put in the market,” he said.
What LightYear has to offer is an online marketplace where companies can contact sellers and get price quotes for purchasing decisions with more information. The company has spent a lot of time improving the product since last October when you can configure some basic things, the price is available and the lighter will help you buy it. Thankachan said the solution includes a full-service lifecycle, including configuring larger arrays of services, helping to manage the installation of services, and helping to reduce the amount of delays and errors in installation.
Finally, they help track and manage network listings and can automate renewals for the entire group of services. This is a 4X increase in just nine months since the last round. Also, in October the company had a relationship with 400 vendors and today it has grown to 500 mid-vendors. The startup has doubled the number of employees to about 20.
