Zayo was built to buy things. Its founders started it in 2007 with a plan to roll up the fiber networks left over from the telecom bust, and by 2014 it had bought many of them. The biggest was AboveNet, bought for about $2.2 billion. By its October 2014 offering, Zayo's fiber ran over 81,000 route miles and reached 4,200 cell towers and 756 data centers. Video, cloud computing and phones were driving demand.

A Roll-Up in Boulder

Dan Caruso and John Scarano started Zayo in Boulder, Colorado, in 2007. The company was founded with a stated thesis: build a bandwidth infrastructure platform and take part in the consolidation of the industry. The bet was that fiber, once laid, lasts for decades, and that whoever owned the most of it in the right places could lease it again and again. Zayo bought networks from failed and struggling carriers and tied them together.

Nineteen Dollars, Then Private

Zayo priced its shares at $19 in October 2014 and listed on the New York Stock Exchange as ZAYO, raising about $400 million. It kept buying networks, in the United States and Europe. In 2019 it agreed to sell itself. The deal closed in March 2020, when Digital Colony and EQT took Zayo private in a deal worth about $14.3 billion, including debt.

Cover: Segovia, The Aqueduct from Market, from Castilian Days, Joseph Pennell. Art Institute of Chicago, public domain. Chosen for an aqueduct (infrastructure that carries the flow).