TAM Time: Buffalo’s HelixIntel was founded in 2020, raised $11M in 2023 and is absolutely exploding in 2026.
Series B interviewed company CEO Jon DeWald about what the future holds.
HelixIntel leaders knew all along that commercial building managers struggled to maintain their properties and equipment.
Now some of the world’s largest insurance companies have become investors, distribution partners and customers.
And the floodgates have come loose on the company’s growth.
“We started signing new SaaS contracts in May last year, we’ve been signing them ever since and it is beginning to accelerate,” CEO and cofounder Jon DeWald said. “We’re in a unique moment where the insurance company is turning a multi-trillion reactive budget into a proactive spend. They’ve realized their business model is broken.”
What’s broken, according to DeWald, is both simple and devastating: property and casualty claims are rising faster than premiums.
When those companies go looking for solutions, they find HelixIntel, backed by some of the biggest names in the business after spending years building out a robust toolkit that supports property and equipment maintenance at commercial facilities.
At the beating heart of the company’s value is its proven ability to reduce claims against those property managers.
The Larkinville-based company was founded in 2020 by DeWald along with Peter Burakowski and Michael Mainier — the latter two have since moved on to other leadership positions in Buffalo. The company received early backing from Launch NY and Lauren DeLuca’s Motivate Ventures.
It was Deluca who introduced the team to Munich Re Ventures, one of the world’s largest reinsurers, which would become an investor and distribution partner for HelixIntel. The company used that partnership to explore the property insurance value chain, eventually realizing that insurance companies aren’t just distributing the software but also its main customers.
The result is HelixCMMS, which creates more reliable maintenance programs, and in the process prevents property losses. That means fewer claims. And fewer claims leads to big savings for insurance companies.
About half of HelixIntel’s 26 employees work out of Buffalo, which will remain its operational hub as hiring picks up significantly in the coming years. The company is considering near-term options such as a capital raise to make sure it captures the demand for its product right now, but no decisions have been made.
In the long run, DeWald sees May 2025 as the lift-off moment for a very successful company.
“Our mission is to help the insurance industry move from paying for losses to preventing them,” DeWald said. “If we can do that, the impact across the entire economy is enormous.
