In late 2024 our Inside TMN newsletter carried news of an unusual press release between operator group MTN and something called the ORAN Development Company. The two companies said they had formed a strategic partnership to develop and test innovative Open RAN (ORAN) solutions.
The press release said that ODC and MTN Group will carry out joint lab innovative initiatives to test “true” ORAN solutions, and field trials to ensure optimised performance and seamless integration into MTN Group’s existing network infrastructure.
MTN Group will also guide ODC in optimising ORAN software and platform development with artificial intelligence to streamline operational expenditure (OPEX) across the network. The partnership will also focus on cutting-edge research and development in 6G and non-terrestrial communications, incorporating these advancements into ODC’s ORAN stack.
Who is the ODC?
There was virtually no further information on ODC, which was a new name on the market. Asking around, TMN found that those that knew something about ODC were unable to tell us any more, due to NDAs, and those that didn’t know about it, well, didn’t know about it.
But some things were clear. ODC was clearly funded by Cerberus Capital, whose CEO and founder Steve Feinberg was in the running for, and has since been confirmed as, Deputy Secretary of Defense in the Trump administration.
As we wrote in our newsletter: “If we had to take a guess, we’d say ODC is a new venture specifically formed in the USA so as to take advantage of the geopolitical winds blowing in Open RAN’s favour, and backed to a greater extent by Cerberus.” It also appeared to be leaning on ex-Altiostar staff and developers. This has since been confirmed, with LinkedIn revealing many technical staff with ex-Altiostar backgrounds.
Move forward from that initial MTN release to March 2025, and ODC was next named as one of a group of companies named in a new un-Alliance being put forward and backed by Nvidia. At this point, ODC was named as part of the group of companies that would work together to develop “an AI-native wireless network stack based on the NVIDIA AI Aerial platform”
As we reported, “Nvidia is not working with an established AI-RAN partner for the Cloud RAN software. Instead it is partnering with the little-known O-RAN Development Company (ODC) for software at Layer 2 and above.”
Ronnie Vashishta, who heads up Nvidia’s telecoms business, told reporters the companies were going to work to define a next-gen platform that is AI-native, “with AI embedded into hardware and software from day one”, accelerated and multi-purpose, meaning it has the ability to support multiple workloads.
AI-native signal processing will be necessary, Vashishta said, to unlock gains in spectral efficiency that will be required to connected “billions of smart devices” and support AI traffic in the network.
New capabilities such as Integrated Sensing and Communications (ISAC) require a new wireless stack built from the ground-up using AI, Vashista said. “That’s not possible with an incremental approach, bespoke hardware or using conventional algorithms,” he added.
It seemed the goal was also to expand the range of companies that could get involved in the AI-native wireless network.
Nvidia told TMN, “The companies also aim to democratise the AI-native wireless technology to create a vibrant ecosystem and innovation.”
ODC was names as one of the participating companies, and as we noted at the time this was clearly aligned with the USA-native nature of the grouping.
2026 Investment – familiar names
Move forward another year, and ODC is coming further out of the shadows. First, just prior to MWC, it was named within the US-government backed OCUDU programme (more US-native messaging).
And then this week, the perhaps already achronistically-named company said it had received $45 million Series A funding round, led by companies including Booz Allen, Cisco Investments, Nokia, and NVIDIA, alongside Tier-1 telecoms AT&T, MTN, and Telecom Italia. These companies were joining Phoenix Venture Partners and Cerberus.
From the list of companies in Nvidia’s 6G un-Alliance announced a year ago, other investors included Nvidia itself, Booz Allen and Cisco. MTN, named in the original 2024 release as a strategic partner is also there. Then there are the eye-catching names of AT&T and Nokia.
AT&T is eye-catching because it is moving to an all-Ericsson Open RAN platform, mapping out a move to a cloud-native RAN based on Ericsson’s vRAN software.
Nokia is eye-catching because it is investing in a company that, despite the disparity in scale, is at least in part competitive. In prepared quotes, Pallavi Mahajan, Chief Technology and AI Officer at Nokia said Nokia investment reflects the move “toward a more software-driven, AI-ready platform and our focus on enabling AI-native networks across 5G and 6G.”
So what is the plan for ODC? Well there are two pointers in this line in the funding release, “This collaboration accelerates the deployment of an AI-native, open-architecture platform—and the definitive U.S.-based RAN stack—that structurally unifies communication, sensing, and edge intelligence.”
There’s have a platform for the AI-native RAN, and we have the “US-based RAN stack”. In other words, many of the companies involved in the 6G development group have now invested in ODC, with the aim of developing a new platform with a US-native background.
In a paragraph that aligned with Nvidia’s recent AI Grid messaging, among others, the ODC funding release said, “ODC is architecting the “Distributed Compute Grid” — the essential Token Factory for the world’s digital and physical infrastructure. By integrating NVIDIA AI Aerial — the platform for high-performance, software-defined 5G — ODC is moving beyond traditional connectivity to enable AI-RAN at the forward edge. This infrastructure serves as the essential fabric for the AI-Native era, transforming today’s cell sites into high-performance compute hubs capable of orchestrating everything from Agentic AI and real-time generative inference to the Physical AI applications that define national infrastructure resilience.”
RANIQ
So what is this platform? Go back one week, and there’s more of a clue in a further announcement from ODC. This was the announcement of its RANIQ platform.
This is a platform that ODC says will be able to expose real-time RAN data into real-time sensing and AI inferencing applications. It says that will turn base stations into sensing nodes and inferencing engines.
The company said the platform will make RAN data and telemetry available on a real-time basis to inference apps that share resources on the RAN compute platform. It said that is different from the way interfaces expose data for network management via O-RAN xApps to RIC-based applications.
“Today’s RAN exposes only aggregated telemetry through management interfaces. Critical signals — beam dynamics, channel state variations, interference patterns, scheduler events and IQ-layer data — remain inaccessible to real-time applications. The result: billions of dollars of sensing, analytics and AI capability embedded in deployed network infrastructure — going unused.”
Instead, by making RANIQ co-resident with the RAN software stack on the the same DU/CU compute node, sharing compute resources and timing with the radio stack, ODC can use RAN data to turn base stations into programmable RF sensor nodes and real-time AI inference engines “without requiring new RF hardware or spectrum.”
“Non-intrusive data taps expose signal intelligence across the RAN pipeline – L1 through L3 – as structured real-time data accessible to applications through the RANIQ SDK, with strict workload partitioning from RAN real-time threads across L1 and L2,” a company statement said.
ODC described RANIQ as a new software layer in the RAN architecture that exposes real-time RF intelligence to applications – these type of hyper distributed apps are known as DApps (as opposed to rApps and xApps in the non-real time and near-real time TIC).
RANIQ operates as an independent runtime on the DU/CU compute node, managing data access, resource isolation and DApp lifecycle. The RANIQ SDK provides the developer abstraction layer for the platform, exposing structured APIs for data access, resource management, application lifecycle and runtime interaction.
As copy on the company’s new look websit, timed to conicide with the funding announcement said, “ODC delivers the Sovereign Distributed Compute Grid for the AI-Native era — unifying communication, sensing, and edge intelligenceinto a single open-architecture fabric.”
ODC in the future
Despite its name, which now seems to hark back to a time when Open RAN was being invested by some with the possibility of a US-led resurgence in wireless, ODC is clearly sitting in the middle of efforts to generate a more strategically important US wireless business. With 5G a done deal, the target is the next phase – 6G and the AI-native air interface. With defence industry and US government alignment, not to mention the backing of major AI-RAN players Nvidia and Nokia, the interesting aspect will be to see how much this company, with its ex-Altiostar technical core, can develop into a meaningful player in the next phase of wireless’ development.
