Leading Edge
JAKE HILL PHOTOGRAPHY
@BIZTIMESMEDIA – Real-time news
nodaFi LOCATION: Milwaukee FOUNDERS: Jacob Pandl, chief executive officer; Dan Pettay, chief revenue officer; and Mike Loyda, senior vice president of growth
Jacob Pandl
FOUNDED: 2018 PRODUCT: Tech-enabled facility management tool TOTAL EMPLOYEES: 4 GOAL: Establish more partnerships and customers in 2021. EXPERIENCE: Pandl works as engineering team lead at Zendesk. Pettay is a software engineer at GenoPalate. Loyda works in Midwest marketing strategy and analytics for AIG. Dan Pettay and Mike Loyda
Milwaukee startup builds platform to ease return-to-work transition By Brandon Anderegg, staff writer
6 / BizTimes Milwaukee JANUARY 25, 2021
A LACK OF BUILDING occupancy in 2020 has posed a challenge for facilities management platform nodaFi, but the Milwaukee-based startup is poised to capture demand for its product as businesses plan a return to the workplace. The two-year-old company offers a webbased facilities management tool that connects visitors of spaces with the people who are responsible for maintaining those spaces. By scanning QR codes placed strategically in high-traffic areas, visitors of public spaces, buildings or businesses can anonymously report issues, allowing maintenance crews, porters or property managers to remedy concerns. “COVID has been a double-edged sword for us,” said Dan Pettay, nodaFi chief revenue officer. “On one end, facility cleanliness is top of mind and has greater importance in the eyes of both visitors and facility maintainers. On the other end, there are a lot of facilities that are closed at the moment.” With COVID-19 vaccines now being deployed, nodaFi founders Pettay and Jacob Pandl, both University of Wisconsin-Madison graduates, are confident their product will catch on. Businesses are envisioning what a return to the office will look like, and Pettay believes nodaFi will become a valuable compo-
nent of that transition process. Using nodaFi’s indoor positioning system, property owners and facilities managers can monitor facility issues and traffic and collect tenant feedback in real time. Facilities equipped with nodaFi have a competitive advantage, Pettay said. “A lot of people are trying to open their doors as soon as they can and a tool like ours can both promote confidence and that visitor health is being taken seriously,” Pettay said. nodaFi has landed a handful of customers including Northwestern Mutual, which is using the company’s product for preventative maintenance and to tailor room-cleaning efforts based on traffic. Pandl and Pettay first launched nodaFi at UW-Madison’s College Library as students in a project-based software engineering class. The entrepreneurs then applied for gener8tor’s gBETA program, graduating in the program’s spring 2019 cohort. The startup is now focused on several 2021 goals, which include growing nodaFi’s customer’s base, doubling user interaction with its platform and building an organic lead generation pipeline that introduces 50 qualified leads each quarter. n
