John Pignato<\/a> described a startup with a competitive drive, fueled by seeing peers do impressive things at close range. \u201cWe\u2019re a team of problem solvers,\u201d said Pignato. \u201cI have trouble putting down problems that aren\u2019t solved.\u201d He said he welcomes the long hours and sees it setting him up to become a founder himself someday.<\/p>\n![\"Cyvl\"](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/10\/Engineers-day-200_19_04_35Still002-e1760725965904.jpg\"\/)
The life of a Cyvl engineer.<\/p>\n
courtesy of Cyvl<\/p>\n
\u200b\u201dHere, Daniel\u2019s like, a year, two years older than me, and he\u2019s doing all these impressive things,\u201d Pignato said. \u201cAnd the other founders as well \u2026 they\u2019re in here early. They\u2019re doing great things.\u201d He said it was \u201creally inspiring to me to see someone really my age, that I can relate to, doing a lot of these big things themselves.\u201d Of the collective work ethic, he allowed, \u201cmaybe it\u2019s a flaw,\u201d sharing that the whole team was at the office \u201cvery late the last three nights trying to solve a problem,\u201d but they feel they just need to finish the work they start. \u201cEveryone feels that way.\u201d<\/p>\n
Full disclosure: the author grew up in Massachusetts in the waning days of the Boston Celtics basketball dynasty of the early 1990s and shared that this description of civic-minded, gritty, hard-working young technies sounds like a well-drilled sports team. When asked about this comparison, Pignato\u2014who was wearing a green shirt at the time\u2014acknowledged that he\u2019s aware of the franchise\u2019s hard-working reputation. \u201cYeah, I\u2019m a Celtics fan, so I relate to it. I don\u2019t know if I see myself in that, but \u2026 that\u2019s what I aspire to be.\u201d<\/p>\n
From splitting wood to filling potholes<\/p>\n
The story starts in Oxford, a small town in southwest Connecticut, not far from New Haven, with Pelaez home from his freshman year of studying electrical engineering at Worcester Polytechnic Institute in central Massachusetts. He told Fortune that he needed a job. He said he \u201cdidn\u2019t have a cool internship\u201d like his classmates, but he thought he could do something physical since he grew up working with his hands, including chopping wood for his old New England house that needed fuel for its wood-burning stove. \u201cMy grandpa was splitting wood in in his backyard in Oxford until pretty much the day he died.\u201d<\/p>\n
Pelaez said his parents flagged a help-wanted ad in the newspaper for the Southbury Public Works road crew. He recalled making a phone call and coming away with a job that day. \u201cThey said, \u2018Sure, come in Monday, you gotta be in at 6 am.\u2019\u201d He said he was stunned by what he found. \u201cThere wasn\u2019t much of a job description, it was just: get a pickup truck at 6 a.m. every day, drive around, find things that are broken, go home [and] do the same thing the next day \u2026 there was really no method to the madness.\u201d<\/p>\n
Pelaez said he asked his road-crew foreman, Jim, how they prioritized projects and heard back: \u201cthis is just how we run the town, we don\u2019t have any information on the potholes, around the broken signs, around the trees that need to be cut, we just rely on people calling in or we need to drive around and find things.\u201d Jim pulled out \u201chuge three-ring white binders\u201d and explained that they had paid \u201can arm and a leg\u201d to a civil engineering firm for an audit and inventory of every road and sidewalk, and it was out of date after one harsh New England winter. Pelaez remembers thinking there had to be a better way to do this, since paving roads is often a town\u2019s largest line item, but \u201cwe\u2019re just sort of winging it, which I thought was nuts. I thought it was insane.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u2018They can\u2019t be the only one with this problem\u2019<\/p>\n
When Pelaez went back to school, he said he started learning about cutting-edge technologies like LiDAR (light detection and ranging, a type of laser-mapping), robotics, and how both work to propel self-driving cars. He said he thought the same technology could actually be applied to government works. \u201cYou don\u2019t see public works and technology or innovation ever in the same sentence and that was the first realization, like, \u2018Wow, I actually think we could do something to help out Jim and the Southbury Public Works road crew. And in my mind I was thinking, they can\u2019t be the only one with this problem.\u201d<\/p>\n
![\"Cyvl\"](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/10\/Screenshot-2025-09-25-at-33634-PM-e1760726008430.png\"\/)
Cyvl maps out roads around the country with cutting-edge technology.<\/p>\n
courtesy of Cyvl<\/p>\n
During the 2019 Christmas break from his junior year at WPI, Pelaez said, he visited Jim again with his friends, both named Noah. He described what became his first ever \u201ccustomer discovery interview\u201d and recalled meeting with 30 public works departments through February 2020, just before the Covid pandemic outbreak. \u201cIt was the classic, like, we\u2019d skip class in the morning \u2026 and we\u2019d just drive to, like, Stowe (Vermont) public works, Harvard (Massachusetts) public works, we spoke with Worcester\u2019s public works department at 6 a.m. because these guys get in so early.\u201d<\/p>\n
Pelaez said they learned in their first year that \u201cthis problem was consistent, it was a big problem, and this technology that we learned about in undergrad for self-driving cars and robotics, it really could be applied.\u201d He also remembered a quote about technological innovation, that when you see something changing or growing exponentially, including exponential decreases in price, \u201cpay attention to that.\u201d He said that LiDAR sensors went from selling for $200,000 apiece, down to $100,000, down to just $5,000 when he graduated. Pelaez and the two Noahs said to themselves, \u201cLook, I think we could use this tech for public works for governments,\u201d realizing how \u201chorribly inefficient\u201d it was being done nationwide. \u201cEvery town and city in America struggles with this exact same problem.\u201d<\/p>\n
A sensor product that\u2019s gotten a big AI boost<\/p>\n
Cyvl\u2019s flagship product is deceptively simple: a plug-and-play sensor kit shipped to city governments, installed on local vehicles, and used to scan every street, sidewalk, sign, and tree while public workers go about their daily routines. The collected data feeds into Cyvl\u2019s Infrastructure Intelligence Platform, where proprietary AI algorithms assess conditions down to the smallest crack or sign of deficiency. Cyvl generates comprehensive, prioritized reports and actionable maintenance plans\u2014turning what\u2019s typically a months-long, costly manual process into an automated review accessible much faster. Governments working with Cyvl routinely see budgets stretch further, sometimes paving four times the mileage with better data and planning.\u200b<\/p>\n
The numbers are impressive. Cyvl says it has partnered with over 400 municipalities and completed hundreds of government projects\u2014ranging from New England\u2019s largest cities to tiny towns hundreds of miles away in the southeast. Active clients now number over 100, Cyvl disclosed.<\/p>\n
\u200bPignato described to Fortune how he\u2019s seen the business get another boost with rapid AI adoption. \u201cDaniel was the one who put his foot down\u201d in December 2024, saying they had to change the way they were working. Explaining how this had rapidly changed the company already, Pignato said that \u201cfor the longest time, we were building one product, which is that sensor that mounts on top of the car,\u201d but AI has transformed this so that they can prototype products before physically building them, and they are getting feedback on tech performance in \u201cminutes instead of months.\u201d AI tools are not replacing engineers, Pignato added, they\u2019re \u201cremoving the grunt work around producing a lot of these reports.\u201d<\/p>\n
Pignato shared a scene from a recent consult with a rival company that wanted advice on how to bring AI into its engineering workflow, and an awkward generational mismatch. \u201cIt was pretty funny when a lot of these, like, older guys towards the end of their career, gray hair, got on the call, and the camera turned on [to find] 26-year-olds on the other end, you definitely see the shock on their face for a little bit.\u201d Pignato added that more and more people are reaching out from an engineering perspective, because Cyvl has shipped three or four products already this year, \u201cwhich is breakneck speed.\u201d<\/p>\n
![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/10\/Scanners-and-Set-up-A7s00_08_33_18Still005.jpg\"\/)
<\/p>\n
Life in the \u2018996\u2019 lane<\/p>\n
Pelaez described the price that he\u2019s paying to see Cyvl succeed. \u201cI don\u2019t think anyone starting their own company that expects it to be a high-growth startup should expect to work 40 hours or less. I just really don\u2019t think that\u2019s possible, you\u2019re gonna have to work so freaking hard.\u201d He described the long hours as he and the two Noahs ramped up in the early days. \u201cFor like an entire year, we did not sleep,\u201d he said, describing marathon code-writing sessions, seven days a week for two years straight. \u201cThat was pretty crazy and, like, I\u2019m sure we got close to burning ourselves out.\u201d<\/p>\n
Pelaez said they\u2019ve learned that it\u2019s \u201cimportant to take some time for yourself\u201d but that he also couldn\u2019t recall the last proper vacation he\u2019d taken. \u201cI\u2019ll do, sometimes, some weekend trips. I like to go camping up in New Hampshire, Vermont or Maine.\u201d When asked about the \u201c996\u201d phrase, Pelaez said he\u2019s familiar with it and it rings true. \u201cI\u2019ve now been trying to take one day a week just to, like, wrap up earlier and maybe [get] a workout in or maybe cook a meal myself.\u201d<\/p>\n
When asked about the difficult hiring climate for the rest of his generation, with Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell<\/a> even acknowledging that \u201ckids coming out of college and younger people, minorities, are having a hard time finding jobs,\u201d Pelaez said he\u2019s not seeing that at his business.<\/p>\n\u201cI think, honestly, while the job search has been hard for really entry-level across all industries,\u201d Pelaez said, \u201cin some ways I feel like we\u2019re benefiting from it.\u201d He said Cyvl is looking for \u201cyoung talent that\u2019s ripe to be developed and super-hard workers is what we need to keep the energy high and new ideas flowing, so that\u2019s been working out for us, honestly.\u201d Adding that \u201cthe talent pool in Boston is awesome,\u201d Pelaez said that he\u2019s been loyal to his alma mater, hiring up a lot of WPI grads. \u201cI feel like I\u2019m getting old, but yeah, we continuously find awesome [talent], the brightest minds of kids graduating college and we continue to hire really strong.\u201d<\/p>\n
![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/10\/Cyvlians-Team-Photo-3-1JPG.jpg\"\/)
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