The ‘Boundary Breakers’ series features senior leaders from Nokia’s partner companies who have challenged the status quo, embraced risk and beat all odds to transform their business and improve the lives of their people.

As part of their Boundary Breakers series, Nokia has profiled our CEO Amajit Gupta as ‘the disruptive newcomer’ for his efforts in reshaping the telecoms industry by being the first to introduce a unique carrier-neutral infrastructure platform.

Let’s find out more about how Amajit Gupta set off on this unique quest to reshape the fabric of the telecoms industry.

The Connectivity Challenge

With a collective population of over one-and-a-half billion people and a rapidly evolving business landscape, India and Indonesia were facing connectivity challenges. The lack of fiber and frequent outages negatively impacted businesses, holding them from operating at their full potential in the digital age.

A Blank Canvas for a Digital Revolution

Amajit Gupta was clearly able to recognize how the aging network design of India's legacy telcos was preventing businesses from meeting the increasing digital consumption demands of their customers.

To cater to India’s growing demand for blazing fast digital experiences and
high-quality underlying digital infrastructure to deliver these experiences, he started Lightstorm, a unique carrier-neutral infrastructure platform.

Drawing from his experience at leading networking, telecoms, and computing organizations, Amajit Gupta was able to see a white space in the industry that no one had tapped into before and set out to solve problems nobody else had solved.

Lightstorm: Born in the Eye of the Pandemic

Lightstorm was born in the middle of the perfect storm, obtaining its license in August 2020, and building sites while the roads were empty and the streets were quiet.

Meticulous planning and coordination with both internal stakeholders as well as external partners and government agencies was necessary, to set up the architecture during the pandemic.

Lightstorm: Growing and Connecting

Lightstorm was created with the mission of helping enterprises leapfrog into the cloud era. As a newcomer to the market, the growing startup had the opportunity to build the network architecture from scratch and it did so without any legacy infrastructure or past investments to slow its growth journey. Its design-first approach enables co-creation of solutions with its customers, providing a truly neutral platform, able to serve any enterprise or network partner.

“Lightstorm has grown exponentially from just a few employees to a few hundred during the pandemic.”

- Amajit Gupta, Group CEO and Managing Director, Lightstorm.

Solutions for Large-Scale and Small-Scale Enterprises

Lightstorm primarily serves organizations that need ultra-reliable, ultra-scalable, low-latency pathways to the cloud. Its primary audience includes large cloud providers that want to distribute their content deeper into the countryside and cities, connecting the country and providing an equally fantastic experience on phone and home connections. One of Lightstorm’s key focus areas is to help enterprises embrace the best of the cloud.

Lightstorm: A Game Changing Disruptor

With a state-of-the-art, data center interconnect network, and cloud-native networks, Lightstorm is truly a game changer in the region. By bringing together cutting-edge technologies in a unique way, it aims to ease congestion in India’s network infrastructure, while reducing bandwidth cost, ensuring 100% uptime, and helping businesses benefit from the digital economy.