A few years ago, we made a deliberate decision to evolve beyond the 5G Open Innovation Lab and become Khasm Labs. At the time, we didn’t fully explain why we made that change - or why it mattered.

Looking back, the transition wasn’t just a rebrand. It reflected how much we had grown, how the market was changing, and what we believed the next phase of innovation truly required.

This update is about explaining that why.

Outgrowing the Original Box

The 5G Open Innovation Lab was built to solve a specific problem: helping telcos realize the full potential of 5G by bridging them into the global innovation community and accelerating the adoption of emerging technologies.

We operated as a non-equity, multi-stage startup broker focused on collaboration, proof-of-concept work, and commercialization. That model worked - exceptionally well.

Over time, the ecosystem grew to include 152 multi-stage startups that collectively raised $3.5B in venture capital, alongside world-class enterprise and technology partners. Sixteen alumni were acquired, representing more than $1.4B in acquisition value.

But as the market matured, something became increasingly clear:

We were no longer just an innovation lab.

We were:

• Designing and deploying production-grade networks

• Building platforms, not just facilitating pilots

• Experimenting with new business models, not just new technologies

• Supporting enterprise, federal, and public-sector deployments in real environments

The scope of our work had expanded far beyond what the “5G Open Innovation Lab” label could accurately represent.

From Facilitators to Builders

As edge computing, private cellular networks, and AI began to converge, it became obvious that presentations and whiteboards weren’t enough - especially in a risk-averse telco industry.

That realization led to three major evolutions.

1. KhasmX: Our Skunkworks for Hands-On Innovation

We launched KhasmX as a dedicated business unit to experiment - not in theory, but in practice.

Innovation isn’t easy. Neither is the process of building, testing, rebuilding, and proving a business opportunity. If it were, everyone would be doing it. Markets reward those who take risks, yet many industries are culturally resistant to doing anything different.

Technology is often the easy part. Battling the “no’s” is innovation’s greatest obstacle.

The mission of KhasmX is to:

• Integrate startup technologies into real enterprise and public-sector environments

• Experiment with emerging business models

• Rapidly validate new platforms and architectures

• Share learnings - including failures - with partners and clients

This hands-on, engineering-led approach allows us to explore new opportunities without being constrained by legacy assumptions. When we fail - and we have - the learnings themselves become valuable outcomes for our partners and alumni.

2. Building Our Own Platforms

To truly understand what enterprises and government organizations need, we chose to build our own platforms - not to compete with startups, but to learn faster and deeper.

That decision led to the creation of:

• KEEN (Khasm Enterprise Edge Network) for Enterprise Private 5G

• Telco AI Cloud (TAC)

Both platforms allow us to experiment with real-world constraints - RF challenges, latency, security, resilience, deployment speed, and operational complexity - in ways that slides and pilots never could.

3. From Proofs of Concept to Production & Operations

As enterprises and public-sector organizations moved beyond pilots, it became clear that innovation alone wasn’t enough. Success required the ability to deploy, operate, and support private cellular and distributed AI edge infrastructure in real environments.

We built services and delivery capabilities to support customers end-to-end - from initial vision and design through deployment and ongoing operations. Whether supporting warehouses, ports, disaster response, or defense environments, we took responsibility for outcomes, not just experimentation.

This evolution is what makes Khasm credibly different from:

• Traditional startup programs (accelerators, incubators, venture studios)

• Advisory firms

• Pure-play system integrators

• Hardware or software vendors

Introducing KEEN: More Than Connectivity

KEEN was born from a simple insight:

Enterprises don’t just want connectivity - they want connectivity that behaves like IT infrastructure, not telecom infrastructure.

Private 5G represents a market opportunity telcos have yet to fully realize. We saw early parallels between private 5G and prior platform shifts such as PCs, mobility, and cloud computing — where durable value is created through ecosystems, applications, and repeatable deployment models.

KEEN is a pre-integrated, standalone private 5G edge platform designed from an enterprise perspective, not a telco macro-network mindset.

KEEN provides:

• Secure, resilient, low-latency connectivity

• On-prem and edge application support

• Rapid deployment (often same-day; under 10 minutes for portable kits)

• Independence from cloud-only architectures

• The ability to scale from one site to hundreds

KEEN combines:

• Standalone private cellular networking

• Enterprise-grade networking and firewalling

• Embedded 5G timing and synchronization

• Edge compute for local application processing

• Remote management and multi-backhaul support

Delivered as hardened rack-mount or portable systems, KEEN is 3GPP-compliant and designed to meet enterprise requirements for openness, flexibility, and security.

Designed for the Real World

KEEN has been deployed — and proven — in some of the most demanding environments including:

• Distribution yards and ports

• Department of Defense and public-sector operations

• Warehouses

• Contested and first-response environments

From Inseego hotspots and connected cameras and hotspots to robotics, automation systems, wearables, and IoT devices, KEEN enables secure, reliable connectivity where Wi-Fi and traditional networks fall short.

Because KEEN supports edge applications, data can be processed locally - reducing latency and enabling real-time, mission-critical decision-making.

Introducing Telco AI Cloud: Serving AI at the Edge

AI will be a foundational enterprise and public-sector investment for decades. Yet the most valuable data is increasingly generated outside centralized data centers, while most AI architectures remain cloud-centric.

Telcos have a unique advantage: proximity to data.

The Telco AI Cloud (TAC) pilot was created to address this reality. As organizations deploy AI deeper into operations, intelligence must move closer to where work happens - on factory floors, in ports, hospitals, retail environments, and cities.

In partnership with AT&T, Microsoft, Dell, and Accenture, TAC explores a distributed architecture where:

• Real-time inference occurs at the edge

• Cloud environments provide governance, reasoning, and policy

• Telcos expand their role beyond transport into intelligence

Supporting Customers End-to-End

Another key reason for the transition to Khasm Labs was our desire to support enterprises and partners across the entire lifecycle - not just proofs of concept.

Our engagement model spans:

• Envision – Defining goals, use cases, and validating devices and applications

• Validate – Demonstrating alumni solutions meet real-world requirements

• Integrate – Pre-staging, deployment, verification, and documentation

This reflects the reality of enterprise and public-sector deployments, where execution and operations are as critical as innovation.

Why This Matters Now

The telco industry is at an inflection point.

Traditional 5G ROI has not materialized at the pace many expected. CAPEX is under pressure. Enterprises are cautious. Yet the convergence of private networks, edge computing, AI, and applications represents one of the most significant opportunities the industry has seen in decades.

The challenge isn’t technology.

It’s business model innovation - and the willingness to experiment outside traditional boundaries.

KhasmX, KEEN, and Telco AI Cloud exist to explore:

• How connectivity becomes a platform, not a commodity

• How telcos expand share of wallet beyond access

• How new revenue models emerge through deployable platforms

• How telcos evolve into end-to-end ecosystems spanning connectivity, edge compute, and AI

By building, deploying, and operating these platforms ourselves, we generate insights that can’t be learned any other way - and we share those learnings with our ecosystem.

All industries are eventually disrupted. It’s easier to disrupt yourself than be disrupted.

The Evolution Continues

Transitioning to Khasm Labs was about acknowledging reality: we had become something more.

To stay true to our original goal - helping telcos realize the potential of 5G and future generations - we had to step outside industry norms and challenge them.

We remain deeply committed to collaboration, our alumni, and ecosystem-driven innovation. But today, we pair that with real infrastructure, real deployments, and real accountability.

We’ve become specialists in doing.

Innovation is messy. It requires iteration, failure, and the willingness to challenge yourself before the market does.

That philosophy defines Khasm Labs - and why this evolution wasn’t just necessary, but inevitable.