Client story · Fractional CFO + Chief IP Officer

DGS: the company whose patents alone are valued at $18 billion.

One position, two jobs. The financial strategy of the business and the licensing play behind one of the deepest patent estates in wireless.

DGS leadership at the company’s Washington DC headquarters

What the position owned

Not advice. Ownership.

Financial strategy

Owned the financial direction of a business operating at a scale most companies never reach.

Patent licensing

Built and ran the play that turns a patent portfolio from a legal expense into a revenue line.

One operator

CFO and Chief IP Officer in the same person, so finance and IP pulled in the same direction.

The company

What DGS actually does.

Digital Global Systems, from Tysons in the Washington, D.C. area, works on a problem most people never see: the radio spectrum every wireless network depends on. Its systems monitor that spectrum in real time at the physical layer, using AI to spot interference, rogue signals, spoofing and congestion as they happen. Its CLEARSKY platform gives operators and governments what the company calls RF awareness; its drone-detection system classifies unmanned aircraft in under two seconds without needing a signature library.

Underneath the technology sits one of the deepest patent estates in wireless: 725 patent assets, 571 U.S. patents issued or allowed, 144 pending and 10 foreign, and in February 2026 the company announced that this portfolio alone had been independently valued at approximately $18 billion, as of November 2025. The estate is the business model as much as the product: DGS licenses its spectrum-sharing and optimization patents alongside deployments, completed a $25 million raise against a $12 billion enterprise value, and was acquired by the Casa del Fuego family office in a 2025 all-stock deal. The patents are worth more than most companies.

The market

Telecom operators, tower and satellite companies, hyperscalers, private wireless networks, emergency services and defence. Spectrum has become a contested resource, commercially, as carriers and hyperscalers fight over bandwidth, and militarily, where jamming and drones have made RF awareness a battlefield capability.

The business, on one page

The canvas.

Customers

Operators, tower companies, satellite operators, hyperscalers, private wireless networks, emergency services and government agencies, major customers under NDA.

Value proposition

See the radio spectrum in real time: catch interference, spoofing and hostile drones as they happen, and share spectrum that would otherwise sit wasted.

Channels & partners

Direct engagement with carriers, integrators and government, plus standards work with the O-RAN Alliance to put the technology inside the network stack.

Revenue

Patent licensing across the spectrum-sharing estate, alongside platform deployments of CLEARSKY and drone threat management.

Key resources

A 725-asset patent estate independently valued at ~$18 billion, the AI models trained on RF signals, and two decades of spectrum data.

Cost structure

Deep R&D and patent prosecution, offset by a licensing model where the asset, once built, earns without per-unit cost.

The position’s default plays

What a great CFO + Chief IP Officer does in a company like this.

01Runs finance and IP as one play. When the patent estate is the business model, a CFO who cannot price IP and an IP head who cannot model revenue each hold half the picture. One position holding both makes licensing a revenue line with a forecast, not a legal project.
02Clusters 450 patents into sellable products. Nobody licenses a pile. Families get clustered by use case, sharing, optimization, drone detection, priced per industry, and taken to the companies building closest to the claims.
03Builds the valuation bridge. A $5 billion all-stock acquisition is priced on evidence: licensing pipeline, defended claims, revenue per patent family. The position’s job is making that evidence exist long before a buyer asks.
04Keeps prosecution spend honest. Hundreds of filings mean millions in legal spend. The operator kills filings that defend nothing and doubles down where licensees actually build.
05Owns the negotiation table. Licensing giant carriers and hyperscalers is a commercial fight, not a legal one. An operator who has sat on the sell side of exits negotiates it as a business deal with patents behind it, not the other way round.

Coverage

A patent portfolio is either a cost centre or a product. The difference is who owns it.

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**Georgina King***Executive Partnership Manager*

Loowatt: the Bill Gates backed sanitation technology company

The position behind it

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