We’re Pivoting Away from Cities — and we’re excited about what’s next

When we started Fordje, we were fresh from the trenches of national residential solar. Our major pain point was the same problem that everyone in construction or clean tech feels: confusion about city codes and their constant changes. It slowed everything down - designs, permits, inspections, even customer trust. And worse? It was avoidable.

Permit rejections and inspection failures don’t just mean tweaking a form. They ripple:

• Every rejection means teams starting at the beginning of the process have to rework plans. The further downstream your project is when the issue is caught, the more people need to do rework. And with an average 25% permit rejection rate, teams are wasting a quarter of their time re-doing what should have been right the first time.
• Project delays are expensive. Developers are left scrambling to reallocate labor, manage investor expectations, and sometimes eat the cost of cancellations.

Now imagine trying to expand into a new state and your rejection rate jumps to 50%. It’s a painful, expensive mess.

So we thought, what if we worked with cities? Help them manage and clarify their own codes, and in return, we get clean data pipelines for developers. We spoke with cities who seemed excited. It seemed like a win-win.

So after a few months of ideation, we went full time in July and began working on this problem.

People are excited about what we’re building! But we learned a lot:

• National coverage is the big lever for construction developers. They want to see that the vast majority of cities they work in are already covered, no matter how fast we can ingest codes.
• City participation is interesting but it isn’t a dealbreaker. Developers care about accuracy, not the source.
• There are 28,000 municipalities in the U.S. Even if we get 15% market share (only currently achieved by big players), we HAVE to figure out a way to gather the rest of the data.
• Conclusion? City involvement isn’t the lever. National coverage is.

So we’re pivoting.

We’re stepping away from selling to cities — and doubling down on being the data backbone for construction.

Our Refined Focus: Powering Faster Deployment in the Built Environment

Fordje is now laser-focused on the people deploying residential housing and clean tech. Developers, EPCs, field teams.

The mission stays the same: clarify city codes so housing and clean tech get deployed faster. But now, we’re doing it by building the most accurate, usable, and up-to-date national repository of local codes. And we’re continuing to leverage AI to synthesize this information into something useable in seconds - not hours or days.

Fordje powers the entire build lifecycle — not just one step

Most solutions in the space focus on a single stage — permitting, compliance, or zoning.

Fordje is built to serve every phase of the build lifecycle. From early market selection and project sourcing, to engineering, permitting, field execution, and final inspections — every team needs code data to move forward. And when that data is missing or wrong, weeks of work can unravel downstream.

Our platform aligns everyone, early and often. That means fewer re-submittals, fewer surprises in the field, and faster timelines across the board.

This is what makes Fordje defensible - and indispensable. It allows us to serve every stakeholder in a project, reduce friction at every phase, and scale faster than point solutions tied to a single vertical or use case.

We’re not just solving permitting. We’re enabling smarter deployment of clean tech and housing — more solar on roofs, more EV chargers in cities, more ADUs and infill housing in backyards.

We’re building the infrastructure that makes it all possible.

How are we doing it?

Without the distraction of multi-market GTM, we can finally sprint toward what matters most.

We’re shipping fast and working with residential housing companies who saw us pitch at the International Builders’ Show. We’re actively building clean tech specific tools, and bringing on early users to direct those features.

And we’re leaning into what’s working:

• Clean tech roots: Our network runs deep. We’re tapping it.
• Conference traction: When we’re on stage, people listen. We’re getting on stage at industry events.
• Build lifecycle partnerships: We can highlight our scope by integrating with softwares across the full build lifecycle and building strategic partnerships. We are already dipping our toes in here with some exciting possibilities.

To Everyone in Government and GovTech - Thank You

We’re immensely grateful to the cities and GovTech leaders who’ve  cheered us on, given us advice, and pointed us in the right direction. It has been instrumental and generous. We would have still been at “we have a theory” stage without you.

We still believe in the features we were planning for cities: identifying internal code conflicts, national code search and benchmarking, and providing clear pathways for businesses and developers with clear city codes. But we now believe that solving these challenges through developer-side insights will deliver faster, more scalable impact.

Cities remain a critical piece of the deployment ecosystem. We plan to use our data to provide insights to cities in different ways, and expect to partner with cities to move housing and clean tech forward in their cities.

So let’s build faster. Together.

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