Cadence OneFive offers a tentacular product surface, where we serve building owners and their representatives (First Service, Related), program administrators (Willdan), contractors, auditors and consultants (SWA), government agencies (NYSERDA, HPD, etc), and our own team acting as consultants on behalf of end users (e.g. for L+M).
Our tech stack needs to enable the team to deliver on short-term contract based deliverables (custom work), and build generic foundations of a product that can be sold at scale to many different types of customers. This document aims to provide a map of our major tech components (our current "sets of lego bricks"), their customers, value proposition, and future direction.
Our technical architecture consists of three integrated components that create a defensible data and technology advantage.
Our Building Knowledge Base (BKB) aggregates and normalizes building data from disparate public sources, creating the most comprehensive dataset of building attributes, energy usage, and compliance information available for NY multifamily buildings, with a structure and platform expendable nationally and across property types. Our Building Calculation Service transforms this foundational data into actionable insights through predictive modeling of building systems, energy performance, measure impacts, and financial outcomes. The Momentum Application provides customer-facing interfaces that make these insights accessible to different user types while creating feedback loops that improve our data quality, and powers building project management functionality.
The technical strategy centers on building defensible IP through superior data quality, domain-specific modeling capabilities, and flexible interfaces. While we leverage LLMs for document processing (data ingestion) and image analysis, our core competitive advantage lies in traditional ML approaches trained on our proprietary building dataset and validated through real-world customer feedback. This creates a virtuous cycle: better data enables better predictions, which attract more customers, which generate more feedback data, which improves our models.
Our 2025 focus is expanding beyond NYC multifamily buildings to serve statewide and multi-property-type customers like NYSERDA and the NYCA, while building the technical foundation to scale 10x without performance degradation. The long-term vision positions us as the authoritative source for building intelligence in the energy transition.
The BKB is our foundational data platform that consolidates detailed building information from multiple public sources into a unified, high-quality dataset. Starting with physical attributes, energy usage, and compliance data for NYC multifamily buildings, we're expanding to all property types across NYS and select other states, plus climate risk factors like flood zone data.
Core Technology Stack: DBT for data transformation, PostgreSQL for storage, Metabase for analytics interface
Data Aggregation: Automated ingestion from 15+ public data sources including DOB, DEP, utility data, and census information
Data Quality: Normalization, validation, and smart arbitration across conflicting sources using domain expertise and statistical methods
Building Coverage: Complete dataset for NYC multifamily buildings (647k) + 3k buildings across NY state ; 142k MA buildings ; 179k buildings across the rest of theUS.
Update Cadence: Monthly refreshes with change tracking and impact assessment
Access Patterns: Direct database access for internal users + applications, Metabase dashboards for customers
For Customers: We eliminate the need to manually aggregate, clean, and maintain building data from dozens of sources. Our domain expertise, validation processes, smart arbitration across sources, and provenance tracking deliver higher quality data than customers can achieve independently.
Competitive Differentiation:
Domain Expertise: Our team's deep building science knowledge enables intelligent data arbitration and validation
Feedback Loops: Constant refinement based on customer usage and internal building analysis projects
Transparency: Full data lineage and confidence scoring (coming 2025) builds trust and enables debugging
Freshness: Regular updates ensure compliance and energy data stays current
Momentum Application: Powers all building lookups, baseline data display, and calculation inputs.
NYSERDA (Production): New customer for statewide building analytics. Will use our generic dataset augmented with proprietary NYSERDA data and external vendor sources. Access via Metabase for energy benchmarking analysis and program targeting. Statewide/non-MF data added on behalf of NYSERDA will also help increase coverage in Momentum, and align with HPD needs.
HPD (Prospective via KC3): Evaluating our platform for housing analytics to complement/replace their existing systems.
Program Managers & Contractors: Use advanced search capabilities in Momentum to identify buildings suitable for specific efficiency programs and measures.
Internal Consulting: Jason, Naina, and Robin leverage BKB for custom analysis projects on behalf of clients.
Scaling Challenges: Technical debt and infrastructure constraints could limit growth - addressing by current refactors away from NY/Multi-family specific schemas, getting contractor support for DB optimizations
Custom Request Overload: Ad-hoc data requests could distract from platform development - addressing by offering a self-service dashboard creation tool, but will still need vigilance - or subcontracting custom requests.
Integration Complexity: Risk of creating data silos that don't integrate well with Calc Service and Momentum. Ideally, Calc Service and Momentum should quickly benefit from improvements to the BKB, and generate feedback to improve the data.
Opportunities:
Market Leadership: Potential to become the authoritative building data source (at least for sub segments of buildings)
Public-Private Partnership: Contributing to open building performance datasets
Data Network Effects: More customers create more feedback, improving data quality for all users
Success Metrics:
Data coverage (buildings, geographies, data points)
The second set of lego bricks of our technical stack is the Calculation Service, our predictive engine that transforms building base data from the BKB, optionally augmented with user-provided data (EPA Portfolio Manager scores, parsed documents, building "metas") into actionable insights about building performance, improvement opportunities, and financial outcomes. It applies our proprietary models to predict system characteristics, energy performance, measure impacts, compliance exposure, and financial returns.
At its core, the Calc Service is an engine to model both the state of a building, and transitions between states (measures) including systems (heating, cooling, etc) types, age, load, energy usage, payers ; exposure to fines per local BEPS; energy rates ; climate ; and changes to a building ("measures" applied to it, together or separately), with a focus on cost, energy efficiency impact, GHG emission impact, etc. This approach lets us model complex what-if scenarios with different measures / buildings / change sequences.
Core Technology Stack: Python-based microservice architecture, PostgreSQL for model data, APIs for integration (gradually implementing GraphQL endpoints).
System type inference (heating, cooling, envelope characteristics)
Energy usage modeling and benchmarking
Measure applicability assessment based on building characteristics
Climate load calculations and weather normalization
70+ different types of measures available, primarily covering energy efficiency, with models for geographically adjusted price, energy impact, applicability, incentive program support
Measures can be combined, chained, implemented over time, selected automatically (scope building strategies)
Financial Modeling:
Improvement cost estimation using market data and team surveys
Rebate and incentive calculation across multiple programs
Operating expense projections (energy, maintenance costs) based on in-house expertise or TRM-derived formulas
Net present value analysis for measure packages
Compliance Analysis:
Local BEPS applicability determination
Fine exposure calculation under current and proposed regulations
For Building Owners: Transforms static building data into investment-grade analysis. Instead of hiring multiple consultants for energy audits, financial modeling, and compliance analysis, customers get integrated insights that account for interactions between different improvement measures.
For Program Administrators: Enables portfolio-level screening and targeting. NYSERDA can identify which buildings are best candidates for specific programs and estimate program-level impacts before launch.
Competitive Differentiation:
Integrated Analysis: Unlike point solutions, we model the interactions between building systems, financial incentives, and regulatory requirements
Market-Calibrated Models: Our cost and performance models are continuously refined using real project data from customer implementations - using manual corrections today, real data feedback in the future
Scalable Intelligence: Applies building science expertise at scale - one API call can analyze scenarios that would typically require days of consultant time
Momentum Application: Powers all building analysis features including measure recommendations, financial projections, and compliance dashboards. Provides single-building deep-dive analysis.
L+M and Building Owner Services: Our building science team uses the service to generate custom feasibility studies and investment analysis for large building portfolios. Currently requires technical expertise but moving toward self-service capabilities.
Internal Analysis: Supports our consulting engagements by enabling rapid scenario modeling and "what-if" analysis for client projects.
Machine learning models trained on our growing dataset of real project outcomes for cost and energy impact analysis - requires training data collection, processing, model training and evaluation, inference engine
Temporal modeling: offer “business as usual” scopes over time, predict maintenance cost modeling based on system age and usage patterns
“Buildings like this one”: cluster buildings with similar characteristics to bundle RFPs, get confidence on predicted impact using past projects
Expended Prediction Surface:
Climate risk exposure, water consumption, health impact, etc.
Batch Data Processing:
Augment “base” building data in the BKB with either pre-calculated or batch calculated estimates of fines, measure costs and impacts, etc. to offer large scale market analysis
API ecosystem enabling third-party integrations and custom applications
Customization:
Let users specify what objectives they want scopes to target, or define standard scopes for their team (enable this capability as customizable from Momentum)
Adoption and Trust: Established industry actors are used to their models / assumptions / spreadsheets and we’ll need to earn their trust, or offer them heavy customization capabilities
Complexity Management: Risk of building overly complex models that are hard to validate, debug, explain, or maintain
Model Accuracy and User Trust: Predictions based on limited training data could undermine customer trust if significantly off-target
API Design: Inflexible APIs could limit future use cases or require expensive refactoring
Maintenance Costs: as we augment our capabilities, we’ll have to keep up with more BEPS, incentive program changes, equipment upgrades
Opportunities:
Market Validation Loop: Real project data creates competitive moat as our models become more accurate
Consulting Automation: Self-service capabilities could dramatically expand our addressable market
Regulatory Intelligence: Deep compliance expertise could position us as policy implementation partner
Success Metrics:
Model prediction accuracy vs. real project outcomes
Time-to-insight: speed of analysis delivery (including debugging!) to end users
API usage growth and customer retention
Model coverage: percentage of building stock addressable by our models for each category (systems, energy usage, BEPS exposure, rebates, measures, etc)
Customer self-service adoption (reducing need for manual analysis)
Last but not least, Momentum is our customer-facing web application that provides unified access to our building intelligence platform. Built on PHP/Laravel, it transforms the raw power of our BKB and Calculation Service into intuitive workflows that guide users from building discovery through project execution. The application serves multiple user types with tailored experiences: building owners identifying opportunities, program administrators targeting incentives, and contractors preparing proposals.
For Building Owners: Streamlines the entire retrofit journey from opportunity identification to contractor selection. Instead of managing multiple consultants and data sources, owners get a single platform that guides decision-making with trusted data and standardized processes.
For Program Administrators: Enables efficient program delivery and monitoring. Administrators can identify target buildings, track program participation, and measure outcomes through a single interface while maintaining program-specific branding and requirements.
For Contractors: Provides rich, standardized project information that reduces proposal preparation time and improves bid quality. Contractors receive pre-populated RFPs with building data, measure specifications, and compliance requirements.
Competitive Differentiation:
End-to-End Workflow: Unlike point solutions, Momentum covers the complete retrofit lifecycle from analysis to project execution
Data-Driven Intelligence: Built on our proprietary BKB and Calculation Service, providing insights not available through other platforms
Multi-Stakeholder Design: Serves the entire retrofit ecosystem rather than optimizing for a single user type
Standardization: Creates consistent processes and documentation that reduce transaction costs across the industry
Convert analyzed scopes into formal projects with defined timelines and budgets
Automated RFP generation and proposal ingestion with pre-populated building data and measure specifications
Contractor portal for proposal submission and project communication
Proposal analysis tools comparing bids across cost, timeline, and technical approach
NYCA Integration & Features
Add support for NYCA-requested features
Reflect and leverage new capabilities / data for non-MF buildings: property types, measures, BEPS, rebates
Specialized dashboards for program administrators and participants
Harden our Code
“Do the dishes as we cook” by applying clean architecture principles on components we touch in the context of feature work, to make our code more modular and easier to test
Identify and address root causes of brittle front-end UI, and strategy to test them
Improved integration testing framework for complex multi-service workflows
Complexity Management: Integrating three independent systems (BKB, Calculation Service, Momentum) while maintaining system reliability and user experience
Testing & Quality Assurance: Limited end-to-end testing capabilities increase risk of integration issues and user experience problems
Building Science Complexity: Risk of oversimplifying complex building science concepts for user interface, potentially leading to poor decisions
Multi-Stakeholder Coordination: Balancing needs of different user types without creating a confusing or diluted experience
Technical Debt: Rapid feature development to meet customer deadlines could compromise long-term maintainability
Opportunities:
Industry Platform: Potential to become the standard platform for building retrofit project management
Network Effects: More users create more data, which improves recommendations for all participants
Market Expansion: Success with current customers could enable rapid geographic and vertical expansion
Data Monetization: Project outcome data could create valuable benchmarking and market intelligence products
Process Standardization: Platform adoption could drive industry-wide standardization of retrofit processes
Success Metrics:
User engagement: monthly active users, session duration, feature adoption rates
Project conversion: percentage of analyzed scopes that become active projects
Time-to-RFP: speed from scope analysis to contractor proposals
Data quality: user correction rates, data validation success rates
Customer satisfaction: NPS scores, support ticket volume, churn rates
Business impact: total project value facilitated through the platform
Strategy Notebook
Technical Strategy
Created: September 3, 2025
Cadence OneFive offers a tentacular product surface, where we serve building owners and their representatives (First Service, Related), program administrators (Willdan), contractors, auditors and consultants (SWA), government agencies (NYSERDA, HPD, etc), and our own team acting as consultants on behalf of end users (e.g. for L+M).
Our tech stack needs to enable the team to deliver on short-term contract based deliverables (custom work), and build generic foundations of a product that can be sold at scale to many different types of customers. This document aims to provide a map of our major tech components (our current "sets of lego bricks"), their customers, value proposition, and future direction.
Our technical architecture consists of three integrated components that create a defensible data and technology advantage.
Our Building Knowledge Base (BKB) aggregates and normalizes building data from disparate public sources, creating the most comprehensive dataset of building attributes, energy usage, and compliance information available for NY multifamily buildings, with a structure and platform expendable nationally and across property types. Our Building Calculation Service transforms this foundational data into actionable insights through predictive modeling of building systems, energy performance, measure impacts, and financial outcomes. The Momentum Application provides customer-facing interfaces that make these insights accessible to different user types while creating feedback loops that improve our data quality, and powers building project management functionality.
The technical strategy centers on building defensible IP through superior data quality, domain-specific modeling capabilities, and flexible interfaces. While we leverage LLMs for document processing (data ingestion) and image analysis, our core competitive advantage lies in traditional ML approaches trained on our proprietary building dataset and validated through real-world customer feedback. This creates a virtuous cycle: better data enables better predictions, which attract more customers, which generate more feedback data, which improves our models.
Our 2025 focus is expanding beyond NYC multifamily buildings to serve statewide and multi-property-type customers like NYSERDA and the NYCA, while building the technical foundation to scale 10x without performance degradation. The long-term vision positions us as the authoritative source for building intelligence in the energy transition.
Building Knowledge Base (BKB)
Overview #
The BKB is our foundational data platform that consolidates detailed building information from multiple public sources into a unified, high-quality dataset. Starting with physical attributes, energy usage, and compliance data for NYC multifamily buildings, we're expanding to all property types across NYS and select other states, plus climate risk factors like flood zone data.
Core Technology Stack: DBT for data transformation, PostgreSQL for storage, Metabase for analytics interface
Current Capabilities #
Value Proposition #
For Customers: We eliminate the need to manually aggregate, clean, and maintain building data from dozens of sources. Our domain expertise, validation processes, smart arbitration across sources, and provenance tracking deliver higher quality data than customers can achieve independently.
Competitive Differentiation:
Current Applications & Users #
Momentum Application: Powers all building lookups, baseline data display, and calculation inputs. NYSERDA (Production): New customer for statewide building analytics. Will use our generic dataset augmented with proprietary NYSERDA data and external vendor sources. Access via Metabase for energy benchmarking analysis and program targeting. Statewide/non-MF data added on behalf of NYSERDA will also help increase coverage in Momentum, and align with HPD needs. HPD (Prospective via KC3): Evaluating our platform for housing analytics to complement/replace their existing systems. Program Managers & Contractors: Use advanced search capabilities in Momentum to identify buildings suitable for specific efficiency programs and measures. Internal Consulting: Jason, Naina, and Robin leverage BKB for custom analysis projects on behalf of clients.
Technical Roadmap #
2025 Q2 Priorities #
2026+ Vision #
Key Risks & Opportunities #
Risks:
Scaling Challenges: Technical debt and infrastructure constraints could limit growth - addressing by current refactors away from NY/Multi-family specific schemas, getting contractor support for DB optimizations
Custom Request Overload: Ad-hoc data requests could distract from platform development - addressing by offering a self-service dashboard creation tool, but will still need vigilance - or subcontracting custom requests.
Integration Complexity: Risk of creating data silos that don't integrate well with Calc Service and Momentum. Ideally, Calc Service and Momentum should quickly benefit from improvements to the BKB, and generate feedback to improve the data. Opportunities:
Market Leadership: Potential to become the authoritative building data source (at least for sub segments of buildings)
Public-Private Partnership: Contributing to open building performance datasets
Data Network Effects: More customers create more feedback, improving data quality for all users Success Metrics:
Data coverage (buildings, geographies, data points)
Data quality scores and customer trust metrics
Query performance and system uptime
Customer self-service adoption rates
Building Calculation Service
Overview #
The second set of lego bricks of our technical stack is the Calculation Service, our predictive engine that transforms building base data from the BKB, optionally augmented with user-provided data (EPA Portfolio Manager scores, parsed documents, building "metas") into actionable insights about building performance, improvement opportunities, and financial outcomes. It applies our proprietary models to predict system characteristics, energy performance, measure impacts, compliance exposure, and financial returns.
At its core, the Calc Service is an engine to model both the state of a building, and transitions between states (measures) including systems (heating, cooling, etc) types, age, load, energy usage, payers ; exposure to fines per local BEPS; energy rates ; climate ; and changes to a building ("measures" applied to it, together or separately), with a focus on cost, energy efficiency impact, GHG emission impact, etc. This approach lets us model complex what-if scenarios with different measures / buildings / change sequences.
Core Technology Stack: Python-based microservice architecture, PostgreSQL for model data, APIs for integration (gradually implementing GraphQL endpoints).
Current Capabilities #
Building Science Predictions:
System type inference (heating, cooling, envelope characteristics)
Energy usage modeling and benchmarking
Measure applicability assessment based on building characteristics
Climate load calculations and weather normalization
70+ different types of measures available, primarily covering energy efficiency, with models for geographically adjusted price, energy impact, applicability, incentive program support
Measures can be combined, chained, implemented over time, selected automatically (scope building strategies) Financial Modeling:
Improvement cost estimation using market data and team surveys
Rebate and incentive calculation across multiple programs
Operating expense projections (energy, maintenance costs) based on in-house expertise or TRM-derived formulas
Net present value analysis for measure packages Compliance Analysis:
Local BEPS applicability determination
Fine exposure calculation under current and proposed regulations
Compliance timeline and pathway optimization
Value Proposition #
For Building Owners: Transforms static building data into investment-grade analysis. Instead of hiring multiple consultants for energy audits, financial modeling, and compliance analysis, customers get integrated insights that account for interactions between different improvement measures.
For Program Administrators: Enables portfolio-level screening and targeting. NYSERDA can identify which buildings are best candidates for specific programs and estimate program-level impacts before launch.
Competitive Differentiation:
Current Applications & Users #
Momentum Application: Powers all building analysis features including measure recommendations, financial projections, and compliance dashboards. Provides single-building deep-dive analysis.
L+M and Building Owner Services: Our building science team uses the service to generate custom feasibility studies and investment analysis for large building portfolios. Currently requires technical expertise but moving toward self-service capabilities.
Internal Analysis: Supports our consulting engagements by enabling rapid scenario modeling and "what-if" analysis for client projects.
Technical Roadmap #
2025 Q2 Priorities #
2026+ Vision #
Advanced Modeling:
Machine learning models trained on our growing dataset of real project outcomes for cost and energy impact analysis - requires training data collection, processing, model training and evaluation, inference engine
Temporal modeling: offer “business as usual” scopes over time, predict maintenance cost modeling based on system age and usage patterns
“Buildings like this one”: cluster buildings with similar characteristics to bundle RFPs, get confidence on predicted impact using past projects Expended Prediction Surface:
Climate risk exposure, water consumption, health impact, etc. Batch Data Processing:
Augment “base” building data in the BKB with either pre-calculated or batch calculated estimates of fines, measure costs and impacts, etc. to offer large scale market analysis
API ecosystem enabling third-party integrations and custom applications Customization:
Let users specify what objectives they want scopes to target, or define standard scopes for their team (enable this capability as customizable from Momentum)
Key Risks & Opportunities #
Risks:
Adoption and Trust: Established industry actors are used to their models / assumptions / spreadsheets and we’ll need to earn their trust, or offer them heavy customization capabilities
Complexity Management: Risk of building overly complex models that are hard to validate, debug, explain, or maintain
Model Accuracy and User Trust: Predictions based on limited training data could undermine customer trust if significantly off-target
API Design: Inflexible APIs could limit future use cases or require expensive refactoring
Maintenance Costs: as we augment our capabilities, we’ll have to keep up with more BEPS, incentive program changes, equipment upgrades Opportunities:
Market Validation Loop: Real project data creates competitive moat as our models become more accurate
Consulting Automation: Self-service capabilities could dramatically expand our addressable market
Regulatory Intelligence: Deep compliance expertise could position us as policy implementation partner Success Metrics:
Model prediction accuracy vs. real project outcomes
Time-to-insight: speed of analysis delivery (including debugging!) to end users
API usage growth and customer retention
Model coverage: percentage of building stock addressable by our models for each category (systems, energy usage, BEPS exposure, rebates, measures, etc)
Customer self-service adoption (reducing need for manual analysis)
Momentum Application
Overview #
Last but not least, Momentum is our customer-facing web application that provides unified access to our building intelligence platform. Built on PHP/Laravel, it transforms the raw power of our BKB and Calculation Service into intuitive workflows that guide users from building discovery through project execution. The application serves multiple user types with tailored experiences: building owners identifying opportunities, program administrators targeting incentives, and contractors preparing proposals.
Core Technology Stack: PHP/Laravel backend, PostgreSQL database
Current Capabilities #
Advanced Building Search:
Multi-criteria search across building attributes, energy performance, and financial characteristics
Export capabilities for external analysis Portfolio Management:
Custom portfolio creation and organization
Sharing and collaboration features for teams Building Intelligence:
Detailed building profiles combining BKB data with calculated insights
Data correction and completion interface for user-contributed information
Historical tracking of user modifications and data provenance
Integration with external data sources (EPA Portfolio Manager, utility data) Measure Analysis:
"Scopes" - curated packages of energy efficiency measures designed to achieve specific objectives
Interactive measure selection with real-time impact and cost calculations
Value Proposition #
For Building Owners: Streamlines the entire retrofit journey from opportunity identification to contractor selection. Instead of managing multiple consultants and data sources, owners get a single platform that guides decision-making with trusted data and standardized processes.
For Program Administrators: Enables efficient program delivery and monitoring. Administrators can identify target buildings, track program participation, and measure outcomes through a single interface while maintaining program-specific branding and requirements.
For Contractors: Provides rich, standardized project information that reduces proposal preparation time and improves bid quality. Contractors receive pre-populated RFPs with building data, measure specifications, and compliance requirements.
Competitive Differentiation:
Current Applications & Users #
Building Owners & Representatives:
Building owners use scopes analysis for investment planning
Program managers use projects to track program progress and impact Program Administrators:
Future integration planned with NYCA for streamlined program delivery Contractors & Consultants:
SWA and other technical consultants access detailed building profiles to support their client work
Integration planned for RFP distribution and proposal collection (2025 roadmap)
Technical Roadmap #
2025 Q2 Priorities #
Key Risks & Opportunities #
Risks:
Complexity Management: Integrating three independent systems (BKB, Calculation Service, Momentum) while maintaining system reliability and user experience
Testing & Quality Assurance: Limited end-to-end testing capabilities increase risk of integration issues and user experience problems
Building Science Complexity: Risk of oversimplifying complex building science concepts for user interface, potentially leading to poor decisions
Multi-Stakeholder Coordination: Balancing needs of different user types without creating a confusing or diluted experience
Technical Debt: Rapid feature development to meet customer deadlines could compromise long-term maintainability Opportunities:
Industry Platform: Potential to become the standard platform for building retrofit project management
Network Effects: More users create more data, which improves recommendations for all participants
Market Expansion: Success with current customers could enable rapid geographic and vertical expansion
Data Monetization: Project outcome data could create valuable benchmarking and market intelligence products
Process Standardization: Platform adoption could drive industry-wide standardization of retrofit processes Success Metrics:
User engagement: monthly active users, session duration, feature adoption rates
Project conversion: percentage of analyzed scopes that become active projects
Time-to-RFP: speed from scope analysis to contractor proposals
Data quality: user correction rates, data validation success rates
Customer satisfaction: NPS scores, support ticket volume, churn rates
Business impact: total project value facilitated through the platform