Cantoo

Cantoo was a cloud telco platform for modern communication service providers. We offered white-label, API-driven hosted telecom services: voice routing, SMS platforms, cloud PBX, phone numbers, and data connectivity. Our clients used Cantoo to create, operate, and grow their own telecom services without building infrastructure.

As co-founder and CTO, I designed and built the entire technical stack from zero. The platform handled industrial-scale voice and messaging traffic with carrier-grade reliability, full regulatory compliance (registered operator in the UK, France, and Germany), and cloud-native auto-scaling and redundancy.

Cantoo became profitable in under two years, reaching €400k/year in revenue. In 2024, we were acquired by 42com, a leading player in wholesale telecom services.

Key contributions

• Designed cloud-native distributed voice infrastructure with auto-scaling and auto-healing
• Built a multi-dimensional routing engine optimised for cost, quality, and latency in real time
• Developed a real-time billing pipeline for instant usage tracking across Voice, SMS, and DID
• Registered telecom operator in the UK, France, and Germany
• Profitable in under two years, reaching €400k annual revenue
• Acquired by 42com: led the full technical integration post-acquisition

Stack

Takeaway

Cantoo proved that you don't need venture capital to build something real. Constraints forced us to focus: we shipped faster, spent less, and reached profitability by saying no to features that didn't directly generate revenue. The acquisition was the result of building something useful, not something flashy.