ORAN Development Company

ORAN Development Company

ORAN Development Company, which trades as ODC, is a wireless software company headquartered in Arlington, Virginia. It was launched in October 2023 by engineers who had built Open RAN software at Altiostar before Rakuten acquired that company, and it is led by chief executive Srinivas Gudladana with Shaygan Kheradpir as chairman. ODC is not a drone or aerospace manufacturer. It appears in this collection as a defense-adjacent edge case: its platform turns cell sites into sensing and edge-inference nodes, which is the network layer distributed autonomous systems depend on, and part of its investor base is defense capital.

What It Builds

Odyssey — an AI-native, open-architecture RAN software platform built on NVIDIA’s AI Aerial stack. ODC positions it as a replacement for conventional baseband software, running radio processing and AI inference on the same hardware.

RANIQ — the layer ODC says converts base stations into programmable RF sensor nodes capable of real-time inference, the basis of its integrated sensing and communications pitch.

Distributed Compute Grid — the company’s framing for the whole product, in which cell towers become a distributed edge compute fabric rather than connectivity infrastructure.

Business Position

ODC is private. It announced a $45 million Series A on 26 March 2026, raised from a syndicate of Booz Allen, Cisco Investments, Nokia and NVIDIA, with AT&T, MTN and Telecom Italia also participating alongside Phoenix Venture Partners. An earlier seed round came from affiliates of Cerberus Capital Management; its size has not been disclosed. Light Reading reported in April 2026 that the company had roughly 100 staff, most of them software engineers in Bangalore and radio hardware engineers in the UK, with a smaller US presence.

The go-to-market is private 5G rather than public mobile networks — enterprise divisions of carriers, plus utilities, manufacturing, banking and retail directly. ODC has named engagements with MTN, Telefónica and Telecom Italia, with proofs of concept expected from the third quarter of 2026. No commercial deployment has been announced, and no revenue figure is public.

Why It Matters

ODC is a useful thing for defense readers to watch precisely because it is not a defense company. Swarms, distributed UAS and battlefield edge inference all assume a network that can carry them, and Booz Allen’s presence on the cap table alongside telecom majors suggests the dual-use case is part of the investment thesis rather than an afterthought.

The commercial question is harder than the technical one. ODC claims to be about two years ahead of Ericsson, Nokia and Huawei on AI-RAN — a claim from a company with no commercial deployments, made about vendors with tens of thousands of live networks between them. Nokia is simultaneously an investor and the competitor ODC would have to displace. Against that, $45 million is a small round for a company proposing to replace the software layer of the mobile network, and everything so far rests on trials that have not started.