Happy 4th Birthday, Cadence OneFive!

This past Saturday, we turned 4! According to the interwebs, having survived to our 5th year puts us in the top half of startups who started contemporaneously. Which is affirming, and worth celebrating – after year 6, the failure rate slows dramatically to about 2-4% per year. So, as far as startups are concerned, “fail fast” is, in fact, a real thing.

Why do companies fail? Again, according to the interwebs:

• 42% fail because there’s no market need for their product
• 34% cite lack of product-market fit as the main reason
• 29% fail due to running out of cash
• 23% don’t have the right team
• 14% fail due to poor marketing

I think we have a lot of validation about market need. Whether we have the right product to meet the need is what we’ll be testing with all our might starting with NYC Accelerator. It’s an exciting milestone!

Metrics

Traction

• Unique Buildings: 10,857
• Annual Run Rate: $1.49M

Financials

• Monthly net burn (3-month avg, accrual basis): -$58,447 (-16.21% MoM)
• Year-to-last-month net burn (cash basis): -$53,553 (-9.1% MoM)
• 2025 Transaction fees to date: $63,403
• Outstanding invoices as of today: $207,380 (-6.3% WoW)

Annual run rate and net burn calculations for October updated after changes to customers and invoices.

Development

• Bug Count (P-0 and P-1): 3

Last Week’s Highs and Lows

• Had a great meeting with folks from NYC and other organizations about standing up a program to support streamlined projects (JB)
• Robin gave an updated tour of the Building Data Platform to our main NYSERDA contact, who had plenty of positive feedback on progress: improved fill rates, data quality processes, building-to-parcel disaggregation approach already solve painful issues from the platform we replaced. (FH)
• We came out relatively unscathed from the great Cloudflare outage of 11/18, thanks to quick action from the first responder, and the (just in time!) login availability via SSO. (FH)

Any missing highlights? Please share in Slack comments.

Crow’s Nest

Looking out for icebergs: What are the risks on the horizon that we’re watching for and navigating around?

Jason’s List

• Improving clarity around our roadmap and prioritization process–I really want/need to put more time into this.
• We may have won some minds, and we’re winning some wallets, but will we win their fingers? Which users will actually use our software instead of just looking for the outputs and expecting consultant-style service?
• What is our moat in a world and industry where data wants to be free, especially when some of our largest customers are city and state agencies?
• Politics Local is looking great! But national is really scary.

Erika’s List

• Performance Metrics - We consistently share some key number (net burn, runway, outstanding AR) but need to do two things - spend more time on strategy/analysis versus making sure our numbers are correct and communicating out so folks (internally) understand what our performance means for the business. Team feedback helps a lot here (and I will be seeking more) because it is important that the team understands our metrics and how we are performing.
• 2026 Budget Targets - Our base budget for 2026 looks good and now it’s time to think about other targets we might want to hit next year (such as new customers, contract changes, and how that would impact the need for additional hiring)

François’ List

• Baton passing: we are purposefully unscrewing the three legs of our platform stool (the BKB, Calc Service, Momentum), turning them into as many batons with which we can move faster as separate pieces, and possibly into separate products. Whether between people or between systems, baton passing is hard. We need to build the structure to make it work.
• Getting ready for more traffic/scrutiny/requirements: NYCA is triggering a list of new infrastructure requirements: higher traffic, system resiliency, additional scrutiny on the security of our systems.

Marc’s List

Carry-over:

• Execution We are the dog that caught the car with NYCA and other stuff brewing. Stakes of everything we do will be increasingly high. So many eyes will be on us. How do we best expand the team?
• Continuing to stay ahead of the curve that is turning into a hockey stick* How much of scope builder will be able to be recreated by an AI native start up in the mid term? What are we doing to build the flywheel so that our customers experience every project making the next one easier and we deepen our moat?
• Process orchestration What tasks should be done by AI, what tasks should be done by AI + humans and what tasks should be done by humans? I don’t have as much of a handle on this for our development work… but this framework has gotten me thinking about how Momentum fits into the wider industry. Where and how can we disrupt things? And where and how can we be disrupted?
• Mamdani!!! Wants to do something biggish and boldish with building decarb… NYC bulk buying window heat pumps has been floated. With a new wave of people in city government… how do we stay relevant and also exert our influence to set up any city scale program for success?

Bomee’s List

• Fueling growth for BKB and Calcs. I’m pretty convinced that we should and can raise in spring 2026, but we need to do our homework so that if we raise, we know exactly where those resources go. Without it, we probably won’t be successful raising.
• Product development process for NYCA, ConEd Recompete and HPD - a lot to organize for 2026
• Getting Marc a product he can sell We need Marc to be confident that we can make things he can sell. We’re making progress taming our process and focusing on velocity.
• Team dynamics Maybe it’s because we’ve been doing a lot of 360s recently, but I feel like there is a lot of communication going on – another positive trend! Let’s no one disappear into any caves!
• Growth on the team we have our process down now, so great opportunity to fine-tune and keep learning.
• Uptake of AI tools - I love AI. Need more tooling (and possibly a dollop of discipline) for the team to fully take advantage.
• Cash. We have deployed a bit more than half our cash in hand and have 15 months of runway.

On Deck for This Week

• A short holiday week!

• Here’s what’s on the Company Radar

Upcoming Release

• SSO for MS
• Team and program admin
• More detail related to parameterizable measures: terminal units editable

Please Leave Feedback

Please note your reaction to this update in the Slack channel. It helps us to know what is resonating, what is unclear, etc. Thanks!

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• Did we miss a highlight? Something else you want to react to?