# About Noetic
> Noetic is a regulatory intelligence platform for land development. It reads each site plan against the actual local code and surfaces the same issues a municipal reviewer would — in hours instead of weeks. Based in Austin, Texas. In pilot with the City of Austin's Development Services Department.
## What Noetic does
Noetic reviews site plans against the actual local code. The same engine packages into three customer-facing products:
- **Site Plan Review** — pre-submission compliance review for civil engineering firms.
- **Site Intelligence Reports** — pre-acquisition regulatory analysis for developers, investors, and brokers.
- **Regulatory Automation** — AI review and triage for municipal departments. The product behind the City of Austin pilot.
See [the product page](https://www.noeticbuild.com/about/md/product) for the full description, including a 10-discipline recall breakdown against City of Austin reviewers.
## Validation
In independent validation with the City of Austin across 10 review disciplines, Noetic identified **129 of 156 issues** the city's own reviewers found on real submitted plans — **83% overall recall**.
> "Noetic is addressing the site plan review challenge with an AI-driven review solution that has the potential to transform the way we do business."
> — **Dr. Eric A. Johnson**, Assistant City Manager, City of Austin
> "Improving the quality of submissions upfront is one of the most effective ways to reduce review timelines. This pilot allows us to test how technology can support that process in a practical, project-focused way."
> — **Shelly Mitchell, P.E.**, Senior Vice President, Pape-Dawson Engineers
## Quick facts
- **Founded:** October 2025
- **Founders:** [Heidi Laki](https://www.linkedin.com/in/heidilaki/) (CEO), [Jason Ford](https://www.linkedin.com/in/jasford/) (CTO)
- **Headquarters:** Austin, Texas
- **City of Austin pilot launch:** April 2026
- **First AI-assisted site plan submissions:** May 2026 ([covered by KVUE](https://www.kvue.com/article/news/local/ai-tool-could-help-make-housing-affordable-austin-population-new-milestone/269-06a75dfe-1afb-4fe2-91ba-b6c7f39b103b))
## Founding story
Noetic was founded in October 2025 by [Heidi Laki](https://www.linkedin.com/in/heidilaki/) and [Jason Ford](https://www.linkedin.com/in/jasford/). Both were AI leaders at Indeed; Jason had also lived the site plan review problem firsthand at [ICON](https://www.iconbuild.com/), the 3D-printed housing company.
Heidi and Jason met at Indeed in 2022 and worked together for two years. Heidi led AI product, building and launching Talent Scout, Indeed's AI agent for employers. Jason led engineering on AI agents in the same group.
With first-hand experience of what was newly possible with generative AI, Heidi and Jason began looking for opportunities to apply this technology to big problems that others might dismiss as "boring" — where the problem was getting less attention than it deserved, and where applied AI could move the work in a way traditional software couldn't.
Prior to Noetic, Jason helped found ICON, where he was VP of Software. ICON used 3D-printing robotics to print homes from concrete with the goal of dramatically lowering construction cost and tackling the housing crisis of the 2010s. The housing crisis has only gotten worse, and technology hasn't yet made much of a dent in solving it. At ICON, Jason lived the permitting bottleneck firsthand. On most projects the biggest time component wasn't construction or printing. It was getting *approval* to build in the first place.
Jason had also been reading [_Abundance_](https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/Abundance/Ezra-Klein/9781668023488) by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson, which argued that American building has slowed not because of technical limits but because of layered regulatory process. The book pushed toward deregulation. Jason and Heidi didn't want to wait on politicians, and didn't want to strip the rules protecting trees, waterways, and public safety. They landed somewhere different: keep the regulations, fix the bottleneck. That meant AI for site plan review.
[Kevin Fleming](https://www.squareoneconsultants.com/), founder of Square One Consultants, validated the idea early and became the first investor in Noetic and a key advisor — bringing decades of first-hand experience to the team.
## The name
*Noetic* — from the Greek *nous*, the kind of knowing that comes from understanding the underlying order of a thing, not just retrieving its surface. Heidi's favorite book is Viktor Frankl's *Man's Search for Meaning*, which uses the same root. The domain noetic.ventures was registered August 6, 2025; the company moved to noetic.inc a few weeks later and eventually settled on noeticbuild.com in early 2026.
## Core team
### Heidi Laki — Founder & CEO
LinkedIn:
Two years in the Peace Corps, then McKinsey & Company and Vista Equity Partners. Most recently led AI product at Indeed, where she built and launched Talent Scout, Indeed's AI agent for employers.
### Jason Ford — Founder & CTO
LinkedIn:
Founded FeedMagnet, a user-generated content platform acquired by Bazaarvoice. VP of Engineering at [ICON](https://www.iconbuild.com/), the 3D-printed housing company — where he lived the site plan review problem firsthand. Most recently an engineering and AI leader at Indeed.
### Sal Saluga — Regulatory Specialist
Site plan reviewer at the City of Austin Development Services Department before joining Noetic in February 2026 as employee number three. Validates findings against the way city reviewers actually evaluate plans and labels the ground truth that drives the accuracy benchmarks.
### Will Navey — Engineer
Joined Noetic in January 2026 from Heidi's team at Indeed, where he was an engineer on the Talent Scout AI agent. Builds the systems that ingest a site plan and produce a discipline-by-discipline review.
## More pages
- [Austin partnership](https://www.noeticbuild.com/about/md/austin-partnership)
- [Customers](https://www.noeticbuild.com/about/md/customers)
- [Product](https://www.noeticbuild.com/about/md/product)
- [Press](https://www.noeticbuild.com/about/md/press)
- [FAQ](https://www.noeticbuild.com/about/md/faq)
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*Last reviewed 2026-05-21.*