Lightyear’s 2024 Year In Review

Each year, company-building humbles me with a new set of challenges, and each year I grow progressively prouder of the Lightyear team for raising the bar for what we are able to achieve. 2024 represented a record year for us: in shipped product, in business milestones, and in all metrics of customer satisfaction. I sincerely hope that I’m able to write an even more exciting recap of our 2025 achievements next year, but we have our work cut out for us.

Lightyear’s 2024 Business Milestones

We topped 300+ enterprise customers and 5,000+ enterprise users with top-tier metrics in customer retention, expansion, and NPS.

Today, we act as the telecom operating system for household names like Five Guys, Pandora, Alo Yoga, Palo Alto Networks, Okta, and a number of other Fortune 500 names we can’t share publicly. Some of our most engaged customers have 100+ individual users in the platform, utilizing it hourly if not daily. Lightyear’s platform is now a full lifecycle, system of record solution rather than the point solution it was 2-3 years ago. Most importantly, we retain nearly 100% of our customers, with top percentile metrics in net and gross retention, underlining the satisfaction we bring to our customer base.

We achieved enterprise product-market-fit with our Network Inventory Manager and Bill Consolidation products, ~tripling revenue within these lines.

Enterprises now trust us to power not just procurement, but the entire telecom lifecycle, while also acting as their telecom system of record across core enterprise systems. Offerings like NIM and BC have allowed us to evolve from an SMB solution into a true enterprise-grade offering.

We raised a $31M Series B while at the same time generating positive free cash flow for the first time ever.

This capital will allow us to double and triple down on what has allowed us to win to date: our product and customer support. Further, it’ll allow us to invest in new and experimental offerings that touch on networking pain points we currently don’t address. Generating cash flow and operating conservatively from a cost perspective gives us even more conviction and room to make such investments.

We maintained a values-oriented, high-performance culture with almost zero involuntary churn and top-tier engagement across the organization.

Culture building at the early stage is difficult, but we’ve been fortunate to get better over time at clearly defining our values and recruiting the right individuals to fit the culture we’ve designed. We’re small today, so I hope we can continue to get better at this as we grow larger.

Lightyear’s 2024 Product Releases

We released Lightyear’s API, paving the way for Lightyear to become the core telecom “system of record” across enterprise systems.

Lightyear has become the closed system of record for enterprise telecom data, tracking every data point around service procurement, inventory, and expense management. Now, this data can be pushed into and out of other core enterprise systems, such as ServiceNow, Meraki, NetBox, and others, with ease. Records can be synced across all data repositories, and automation can be initiated outside of Lightyear’s SaaS platform.

We released informative dashboards for our Network Inventory Manager and Bill Consolidation products, consolidating holistic inventory and spend insights for users.

Navigating your network inventory or telecom spend and drawing holistic insights is now easier than ever. Filter your aggregate spend any which way, understand what services are changing in cost month to month, or even re-shop services our dataset indicates could yield significant savings, all with the click of a button!

We added roles, permissions, global search, and service group tagging functionality to Lightyear’s platform.

Lightyear’s platform now better serves even the largest of enterprises or network footprints with improved organization and navigability. Separate users by role, permission, or sub-organization, search for specific services / sites / documents, and tag users to specific service groups of relevance with ease.

We made many, many smaller improvements to Procurement, NIM, BC, our cloud infrastructure, and our security posture overall.

There’s simply too much to cover here, but it’s a lot!

Thank you for being a part of the journey with us.

- Dennis Thankachan