Cohere Technologies CEO Ray Dolan (pictured) revealed his company has Bell Canada in its sights after it wraps up a test of its universal spectrum multiplier (USM) with Vodafone Group.

Dolan told Mobile World Live (MWL) the field test of USM with Vodafone in Spain is scheduled to finish over the coming months, after which the network software vendor will conduct a similar trial with Bell Canada in Toronto.

Cohere asserts USM has the potential to improve 5G capacity by up to 50 per cent by enhancing the spectral efficiency of RAN networks.

“Bell has been involved in part of our testing in Spain and Vodafone will be involved in our testing in Canada,” Dolan said. “There will also be some North American operators that we haven’t named yet that will be visiting those [Toronto] sites as we build this broad coalition of operators that have the same congestion problem.”

He stated the key to its commercial aspirations is wrapping up an agreement with a large RAN vendor to integrate its software into that company’s existing RAN portfolio so it can be deployed at scale this year.

Bell Canada’s venture arm and Telstra Ventures are among the financial backers of Cohere, along with Intel, Juniper Networks, and VMware. To date, the company has raised about $100 million.

“We’ve got cash for the next two years on our balance sheet,” Dolan explained. “But we do plan to raise more money next year, mostly so we can scale faster and then attack some of those business opportunities earlier.”

Watch the full video interview here.