After doubling its revenues in 18 months, Halifax-based Dugo, which helps enterprise clients monitor remote infrastructure, has secured its first American client, which Dugo describes as a Top 5 player in the cable industry.

Dugo has developed a digital platform that helps telecom providers manage their critical infrastructure, such as remote telecom towers. Dugo says its customers are able to streamline the processes and communications required to standardize, build, and maintain their infrastructure across multiple teams using a unified platform.

The company is five years old, and its Founder and CEO Kianoosh Yazdani has been quietly building the product and client base. That crop of clients has been growing steadily in Canada, and now the company has secured a breakthrough in the U.S. with a Fortune 500 client. Yazdani said it is a transformative deal for his company.

“It indicates that our offering is quite well received by the industry that we’re advertising to,” he said in an interview. He added the client has shown a “strong belief in the product and their willingness to invest time and resources into the product. It’s a strong endorsement of our platform.”

He said the contract with the client prohibits Dugo from revealing its name, but the deal represents a marked change in Dugo’s client base, and its entry into the U.S. market.

Yazdani started working on Dugo in 2016, by which time he had more than a decade of experience as an electrical engineer in the telecom industry. He was familiar with a key pain point in the industry: it’s really difficult to monitor and maintain remote infrastructure, including cell towers. In particular, it’s hard to monitor, recharge and repair the batteries needed to power the electronics on these assets.

So he developed a platform that would help telecom companies and other enterprise clients to monitor their networks, allowing several groups within these companies to have the information they need to maintain the hard-to-reach assets.

The sales cycle is long but Dugo has had a product in the market for three years. The company has grown into a full-time team of seven people with a contractor, and it hopes to hire four people this year and seven to eight in 2022. A key hire was Christopher Kolmatycki, best known in Halifax as a Co-Founder of Fundmetric, who joined Dugo last November as Director of Product and Operations.

Asked why he chose to join Dugo, Kolmatycki said: “A lot of it was that Dugo is solving a unique and niche problem in the marketplace and I’ve always been drawn to areas where most eyes aren’t looking. I liked the phase the company was in and the fact that it used skills I’ve built up. I feel fulfilled every day coming into the office and working with companies, helping them get to the next level.”

Yazdani said the company has raised a bit of equity capital since starting, and he preferred not to discuss future funding plans. The focus now is to increase staff and to use the beachhead it has established in the U.S. to grow further in the world’s largest economy.

“The U.S. market is obviously much bigger for us and at this point our focus is on making sure that this [contract] becomes the full success that we want it to be,” he said. “We want it to help us reach out to other contacts and see how we can provide the same value for them as well. . . . This could be a proving ground.”