It is a peculiar thing, the life of a CEO. A life often measured in the relentless, indifferent metrics of percentage points and enterprise value. They are figures that, when read in a ledger, feel as abstract as the concept of infinity. Yet, these numbers are tethered to something profoundly, messily human: the flicker of a screen in a remote village, the emergency call that connects, the sudden, satisfying speed of a video stream after a decade of digital molasses.
Richard Petti, the CEO of IQGeo, does not strike you as a man preoccupied with the cosmic. He has the precise, efficient bearing of someone who knows the value of a clean line—a geometry major, perhaps, or a veteran air traffic controller. He operates in the realm of the deeply specific, the seemingly unromantic world of geospatial software for the telecommunications and utility industries. It is the plumbing of the digital age, a vast, subterranean, and airborne infrastructure that you only notice when it catastrophically fails.
Petti’s business, at its core, is about making the invisible tangible. It’s about taking the sprawling, handwritten notes, the smudged blueprints, the educated guesses about where a fiber optic cable is actually buried, and rendering it into a flawless, real-time digital twin. He is the cartographer of a world of wires, conduits, and electrons that covers the earth like an unimaginably complicated, silent nervous system.
The Measure of a Day: When the Map is Wrong
The business narrative is neat: Petti joined in 2016 and oversaw a remarkable corporate turnaround, culminating in a $396 million take-private transaction with KKR. He delivered a 1,071% return to shareholders, moving the UK-listed company’s share price from £0.41 to £4.80. This is the brass-tacks story of success in enterprise software.
But if you watch Petti talk, the true obsession emerges. It is not with the share price, but with the unnecessary friction in the world. He describes a construction crew, standing on a muddy road, staring at a schematic that is three years out of date. They dig in the wrong place. They hit the wrong pipe. A day is lost, money is wasted, and a town waits longer for its connection. This is what Petti wants to erase: those small, frustrating, and incredibly expensive mistakes rooted in bad information.
“It’s not just about optimizing tasks in the field,” Petti insists, his voice carrying the slight, focused intensity of a man describing the need for the perfect, clean junction. “It’s about what that optimization enables. It sets the stage for what comes next. Real-time data becomes the fuel for tomorrow’s intelligent network models.”
It is a quest for frictionless truth—a digital reality that, in its simple accuracy, perfectly mirrors the physical one.
The Eye in the Field: Verifying the Smallest Task
The acquisition of Deepomatic in August 2025 was a move rooted in the practical realities of fieldwork. Deepomatic develops AI computer vision—it is, quite literally, an automated eye for the network.
Imagine a field engineer completing a crucial splice in a junction box. In the past, they might take a blurry photo, send it back to headquarters, and wait for a supervisor to manually verify that the work adheres to compliance standards. With Deepomatic, the engineer simply points their phone, and the integrated software, the “Deepomatic Lens,” immediately verifies the work. Is the grounding wire connected correctly? Are the cable colors true? The AI sees, verifies, and records. The task is validated at the point of work.
This is not a grand, speculative technology; it is the genesis of a fundamental shift away from relying on imperfect human processes. Petti calls it the “agentification of the network,” which sounds clinical, but means a system that begins to manage itself, driven by a continuous stream of verified field data. The data, once messy and anecdotal, is now perfect, continuous, and actionable. It’s the difference between navigating with an old, hand-drawn map and having a GPS system that constantly measures every wave and current. It allows network operators, like Virgin Media O2, to strengthen the quality of the data that underpins their decision-making.
The Simple Commitments: From Carbon to Connection
It would be easy to categorize Richard Petti as a pure technocrat, a man who sees the world only as a series of solvable data problems. But his focus is also, curiously, on the edges—the places where the network falters and the world is less organized.
IQGeo is a carbon-neutral company—a small, but necessary commitment for a software firm operating on a global scale. More compelling, however, is the stated passion for helping clients bridge the digital divide. Geospatial software, when done correctly, doesn’t just help a large operator maximize profit; it helps them plot the most efficient, cost-effective routes to connect the last hundred houses on the edge of the service area. It changes the geometry of who gets to participate in the modern world.
The ultimate vision is not about corporate glory; it’s about a perfectly mapped, perfectly functioning, and ultimately, more connected world. Petti, the man who rose by making lines straighter and data cleaner, understands that his specific, deep-dive into the structure of things has a wide, encompassing human outcome. He is using AI and computer vision not to replace human effort, but to finally fulfill a simple human promise: the promise of connection.
He is, in this way, the practical humanist in a world of pure code, charting the very specific, very necessary path toward a reality where the map finally matches the territory.
Also Read: The 10 Transformational Telecom & GIS Leaders to Watch in 2025
