Company Overview
Kat Gordienko is a Co-Founder and CEO of Builty, helping insurers understand a property’s history and condition by turning messy building permit records into structured risk intelligence. Learn more at https://www.builtydata.com.
Can you tell us a little about your background before starting at your company?
I started my career in accounting before transitioning into data analytics and engineering, where I spent over a decade building large-scale data systems in Silicon Valley. Over time, I became increasingly drawn to solving complex infrastructure problems through data. My last role was at Netflix, where I worked on large-scale data challenges. In 2019, I left the corporate world to pursue entrepreneurship.
How did you start at your company? What were the first steps you took to get it off the ground and how did you identify the need for your product/service in the market?
Builty started from a very personal experience. I was building an ADU on my property and became obsessed with understanding the permitting landscape around me. I wanted to know who else was building similar projects, how long their permits took, whether my project was behind schedule, and what construction costs looked like across comparable properties.
I started analyzing permit records from my local jurisdiction and published some of my findings in homeowner and builder communities. The response surprised me. People from across the Bay Area, then California, and eventually nationwide began asking for similar analyses in their own markets.
That led to a bigger realization. The permit data homeowners and contractors submit contains a huge amount of valuable information, but in many jurisdictions, that information is barely being used beyond administrative processing.
Then I noticed something even more important. Despite making significant improvements to my property, my insurance coverage remained unchanged for years. It made me realize how disconnected insurance decisions often are from what is actually happening at the property level. Renovations, electrical upgrades, roof replacements, additions, and other major changes can materially change risk, yet that information rarely reaches insurers in a structured way.
That insight became the foundation for Builty: bringing building permit intelligence into insurance workflows so carriers can better understand dynamic property risk.
What innovations or unique features set your company apart from others in the industry?
What makes Builty unique is not just access to permit data, but our ability to transform highly fragmented public records into decision-ready risk intelligence.
Permit records are notoriously messy. Every jurisdiction structures them differently, terminology varies, and descriptions are often incomplete or ambiguous. We built a large-scale data processing and machine learning system that standardizes permit records across jurisdictions and extracts meaningful property-level signals.
On top of that, we developed risk scores that help insurers quickly assess key dimensions of property risk. Instead of asking underwriters or claims teams to interpret raw permit records, Builty translates permit activity into intuitive signals around property condition, upgrade quality, maintenance patterns, and potential exposure.
This combination of large-scale data processing and risk scoring helps insurers make faster, smarter underwriting and claims decisions using information that has historically been overlooked.
What has been the most effective strategy for scaling your business?
One of the biggest lessons in scaling Builty has been realizing that clean data alone is not enough. Customers do not want to sift through raw permit records, even if they are standardized and structured.
Our growth strategy has been focused on moving up the value chain, from selling data to delivering insights. That means building derivative products like risk scores and decision-ready signals that help insurers quickly assess property risk and act on it.
Looking ahead, what are your goals for the future of your company?
Long term, we see Builty becoming foundational infrastructure for understanding property risk at scale.
We believe the insurance industry is moving toward more continuous, event-driven risk assessment, where important property changes can be detected and evaluated in near real time rather than at renewal or claim time. We are building the intelligence layer to help enable that shift.
