Steve Jobs famously said, “innovation distinguishes between a leader and a follower.”
Innovation was a big part of Jobs’ legacy, and he often noted in interviews how people frequently don’t know what they want until the options are in front of them.
In short, innovation and differentiation are the way to succeed in tech.
Just ask Lukas Mikelinich, head of strategic accounts at Order.co. Mikelinich shared that what fuels the team’s innovation is constantly learning from the customer.
“While we have a great product, it’s the knowledge and passion of our team that sets us apart,” Mikelinich said. “We treat every new conversation like a consultation and our team is exceptional at understanding if and how we can help a prospective customer.”
Meanwhile, Lex Sivakumar, vice president of growth at Regal, said it’s the combination of technical expertise and speed that helps the AI platform succeed, processing $400 million interactions and driving over $8 billion in business outcomes and $1 billion in revenue for its customers.
“We win on complicated workflows,” Sivakumar explained.
Built In spoke with a tech leader from each team who shared what sets their employer apart from the pack — and the proof that backs their edge.
Findigs is the rental screening and decisioning platform made to get renting right.
In one line, where do you consistently win vs. your competitors?
Findigs is the leasing decisioning platform built around one design choice — every application gets a yes or no, not a score. Other vendors flag fraud, rank applicants or hand back a recommendation, then leave the decision to a human. Findigs makes the decision automatically and was the first in the category to put a contractual fraud guarantee behind every approval. That's why Findigs replaces an operator's screening workflow rather than adding to it.
What proof backs that edge?
The proof shows up where operators measure it. Findigs returns a median decision in 3.4 hours, against an industry baseline of two to three days. Customers see up to 80 percent fewer evictions and up to 60 percent lower bad debt against pre-Findigs baselines. Findigs serves hundreds of operators, including McKinley, Imagine Homes and Sentral, across more than 400,000 units. The contractual fraud guarantee on approved fraudulent applications was the first of its kind in the category.
What recurring behavior keeps you competitive?
Findigs runs a feedback loop competitors can't replicate. Every customer sends post-lease performance data, paid on time, late, broke lease, evicted, back into the platform on every decision Findigs made. That data feeds a policy engine operators use to simulate criteria changes against real portfolio outcomes before they enforce them. The result compounds. Model accuracy improves with every cycle, customer bad debt drops further and policy decisions move from gut to evidence. Internally, the same loop sets the cadence. The engineering team ships every two weeks. Underperforming criteria get retired in cycles, not quarters. And Findigs runs the business on the same outcomes it sells.
Regal is an AI platform that empowers companies to transform customer communications with AI agents.
In one line, where do you consistently win vs. your competitors?
We win on complicated workflows. Our founders ran a contact center before they started Regal, so we built the platform for the hardest part of the job — regulated, multi-step conversations where the agent has to pull live customer data, make real-time decisions and sound human doing it. Our proprietary data layer, which includes the Unified Customer Profile, Copilot and intelligent routing, is what makes those workflows actually work in production.
What proof backs that edge?
Our platform has processed $400 million interactions and driven over $8 billion in business outcomes and $1 billion in revenue for our customers. For example, eHealth, one of the country's largest Medicare Advantage marketplaces, runs Regal AI Agents that contain 97 percent of inbound calls, cut cost-to-serve by 80 percent, hit zero wait time and hold 96 percent CSAT in production. That kind of outcome is what happens when the architecture is built for voice from day one and the people building it actually know the contact center.
What recurring behavior keeps you competitive?
We are incredibly focused on driving the most value for our customers in as little time as possible. Every enterprise deployment is paired with a forward deployed engineer who lives inside the customer's data, prompts and call flows, iterating weekly on real conversations. When a pattern proves itself across customers, we productize it so the next deployment gets there faster. Copilot is the clearest recent example. We launched it to reduce the cycle time for building, monitoring and improving AI agents that our FDE team had been running by hand. Every Regal customer now gets that speed baked into the platform.
Order.co is a spend efficiency platform that helps businesses automate purchasing, control costs and gain visibility into companywide spend.
In one line, where do you consistently win vs. your competitors?
Providing finance teams with unprecedented spend visibility and control while day-to-day users interface with a UX that feels like shopping online.
What proof backs that edge?
With 500-plus customers — including brands like Hugo Boss, SoulCycle and WeWork — Order.co is the first fintech platform that combines purchasing through payments into one ecosystem. Businesses managing fragmented purchasing across a multitude of locations have continually leaned on Order.co to support complex operational and financial workflows.
What recurring behavior keeps you competitive?
Our obsession with understanding and learning from our prospective customers plus target audience. While we have a great product, it’s the knowledge and passion of our team that sets us apart. We treat every new conversation like a consultation and our team is exceptional at understanding if and how we can help a prospective customer. We are also first to admit when Order.co is not the correct solution or can’t accommodate specific use cases. Our deep understanding of our audience, product and competitive landscape is our biggest competitive advantage that sets us apart, while also helping us garner immense trust with our customers.
Northslope Technologies is a Palantir partner that develops custom, purpose-built AI products using Foundry and AIP to help organizations drive business outcomes.
In one line, where do you consistently win vs. your competitors?
We win by delivering mission-specific software that drives measurable business outcomes, powered by forward deployed engineers who build around each customer’s unique people, data and operating model.
What proof backs that edge?
We scaled revenue by seven times in 2025 and doubled to 120-plus people, while being recognized as the first and only Palantir Vanguard: elite partner, reflecting deep trust and consistent delivery on high-impact deployments. We’ve worked with 40-plus customers, from SMBs to large enterprises, expanding our largest customers roughly eight times from initial contracts up to multi-million dollar accounts in under a year. Roughly 95 percent of our implementations reach production within six months, allowing us to price at a premium to other Foundry FDE providers while providing great value for money for our customers, reflecting the quality and impact of our work.
What recurring behavior keeps you competitive?
We compound learning across every deployment, codifying what works into internal software that makes each subsequent build faster and higher quality. This is reinforced by a hiring engine that has scaled to 100-plus FDEs (one of the largest FDE teams in the world as a 24-month-old startup) who continue to own deployments in 2-3 person teams. This happens while maintaining the highest quality output on mission-critical deployments, alongside continued investment in our product platform to further accelerate delivery and effectiveness.
Agora is a SaaS and fintech platform transforming how real estate firms manage capital, investors and operations.
In one line, where do you consistently win vs. your competitors?
Agora consistently wins by unifying investor CRM, reporting, portal experience and true operational depth in one platform — bridging fund administration and fund management while handling complex waterfalls, capital-account logic, side-letter variability and both debt and equity structures — so clients do not have to choose between a polished front-end experience and accurate back-office execution. That combination matters because many competing systems are strong in only one lane: some are effectively document repositories with limited interactivity, some offer polished investor portals but only static templates or limited admin integration and others are built around narrower operating assumptions that break down as structures become more complex. Agora stands out by supporting dynamic investor- and fund-level waterfall modeling, better alignment with fund administrators, deeper reporting flexibility and a more scalable path away from spreadsheet-heavy processes. In practice, that means clients get a system that improves the investor experience while also solving the operational bottlenecks that slow reporting, increase reconciliation risk and make growth harder than it should.
What proof backs that edge?
The proof is in the kinds of problems Agora is chosen to solve and the specific gaps it closes better than competing systems. Internal materials repeatedly position Agora as stronger where firms need more than a basic portal: replacing static document-repository experiences with interactive dashboards and statements, reducing manual spreadsheet work tied to capital accounts and waterfalls, supporting fund-admin-aligned operating models and handling more complex structures without forcing the team into workarounds. The same pattern appears in comparisons against other market options: limited or no fund-admin integration, partial side-letter support, static waterfall templates, restricted reporting flexibility and operating models that do not hold up well for more complex private investment structures. Product documentation reinforces that this is not just marketing language — Agora supports investor-specific preferred return accruals, distinct return-of-capital versus return-on-capital treatment, separation of GP capital from promoting economics and event-based waterfalls using allocation-type controls. That is strong evidence that the platform is designed for real-world complexity.
What recurring behavior keeps you competitive?
The recurring behavior that keeps me competitive is staying close to the operational truth of the client’s business and translating that into a clear, executable story about value. The most effective pattern is not leading with generic software language, but repeatedly grounding the conversation in how capital actually moves, how waterfalls are actually structured, how reporting is actually produced and where spreadsheet dependence or fragmented systems are creating friction, delay and risk. From there, I stay disciplined about sequencing; identifying the fastest path to early wins, clarifying what should be solved first versus later and connecting immediate implementation steps to the longer-term strategic vision. That habit matters because Agora’s edge is strongest when the story is concrete — fund-admin alignment, CRM and communication workflows, capital-account integrity, waterfall precision and investor experience all tied together in one operating model. Being consistently specific, operationally credible and implementation-minded is what makes the message resonate and what helps differentiate Agora from competitors.
