Ian Hoppe, founder and CEO of Condoit and a commercial electrician, grew up in the electrical industry. His father is a design consulting engineer who runs a firm in Birmingham, and his uncle and godfather was an electrical engineer who worked on international projects.
As a teenager, Hoppe fell in love with the trade while working for Birmingham-area commercial and industrial installer Summit Electric and with a local journeyman. His family members and mentors taught him the importance of high-quality installation, record keeping and analysis.
After high school, Hoppe spent time offshore in the Gulf of Mexico working in the oil and gas field before returning to his hometown to attend the University of Alabama at Birmingham. After graduation, he was employed by Ray Engineering Group, where he did a large amount of data collection on electrical systems across the state.
“A lot of the work we did was at the hospitals in the Birmingham area,” says Hoppe. “The process was digging through electrical rooms, tracing conduit runs down hallways and literally drawing diagrams and taking pictures of equipment with a digital camera.”
After this time-consuming undertaking, he would then have to redraw everything with computer-aided design software. “The process was cumbersome, prone to error and made me mad,” says Hoppe.
After a few years with Ray Engineering Group, Hoppe made a career change and began working as a journalist with Alabama Media Group (AMG) during his late 20s and early 30s. But he never stopped thinking about ways to streamline the data-collection process and solve the problems he and other electricians faced.
In 2020, Hoppe left AMG to found Condoit and successfully applied for the Techstars Alabama EnergyTech Accelerator, a 12-week program that gave him the opportunity to pitch his company in front of hundreds of business leaders, investors and fellow startup founders — and to make connections with local and national mentors.
Condoit’s cloud-based platform ensures standardized data collection and management that is accessible on any iOS or Android device. The app-based tool helps electrical contractors show their customers how their electrical system affects their organization, compliance and risk profile. By monetizing this existing data, contractors have the potential to build recurring revenue.
Condoit offers a variety of features including a digital single-line diagram builder.
“It’s not just about making drawings — it’s about capturing the intelligence of an electrical system in a living, interactive format,” says Hoppe. “Our mobile-first approach means field teams can collect, view and update this information on-site, in real-time. That kind of accessibility and interactivity is a game-changer for contractors and facility owners.”
This feature also provides the ability to attach photos, videos and notes to any piece of equipment for easy documentation of maintenance issues, code violations or any other relevant information.
The company’s mission is to accelerate the electrical industry’s digital transition by making change easy, data accessible and analysis instant. The app can be customized by user role. For example, engineers and estimators can run analyses and export data for proposals, and project managers can track system health or upcoming maintenance.
“We built Condoit to be flexible. Field users see simplified tools focused on data capture and navigation — like scanning a QR code on a panel and instantly seeing where it fits in the system,” says Hoppe. “We’re building role-based access and views so that every stakeholder gets exactly what they need, without the clutter.”
Condoit’s path to market validation has been a journey of trial and error. “The tool itself is fairly complex — you have to be able to collect anything you may find in the field, and anyone who has ever worked in and around construction knows that things can get messy,” says Hoppe.
It took around 18 months for the Condoit team to develop a tool that was practical in the field. The company initially found traction around site feasibility studies in the fast-growing EV charger installation space. “We ran down that path for a couple of years but recently expanded our target market to include larger electrical contractors focused on maintaining large, complex electrical systems,” says Hoppe.
Hoppe notes that the electrical industry’s size offers an abundance of opportunities for digitalization, making it easy to get pulled into a variety of directions at once. “Building something truly impactful means saying no to a lot of tempting paths,” says Hoppe. “We’ve had to stay disciplined about solving one real, painful problem at a time — and doing it better than anyone else.”
Once the team identified Condoit’s ideal customer, responses were incredibly validating: “We’ve seen growing demand from service and maintenance divisions, particularly as preventative maintenance and 70B compliance become more central to their business. Our customer base has expanded rapidly in the past year, and we’re now getting inbound interest from across the country — from major contractors to national facility owners.” Full-service national contractor Gaylor Electric; Miller Electric Company, one of the nation’s largest commercial electric firms; and Birmingham-headquartered Bright Future Electric are featured among successful case studies listed on the Condoit website.
Although the company is proudly based in Birmingham, Condoit’s team is remote-first, with employees in Texas, Utah, Georgia, Boston, Massachusetts and other locations across the U.S.
“Despite the distance, we’re a tight-knit group that works well together,” says Hoppe. After closing a $4.25 million seed round in April 2024, Condoit brought on Peyton Sherwood (formerly of Venmo and Bond Street, among others) as CTO. Sherwood and the development team worked to rebuild the Condoit application that following summer, adding support for QR-based asset tracking, improving 70B compliance workflows and rolling out tools that help contractors package preventative maintenance contracts. Sherwood is currently working on building features around newly available AI engines that the team is excited to roll out in the coming months.
“On the sales side, we brought in new leadership and launched a fresh go-to-market strategy, and the results are showing in our pipeline and close rates,” says Hoppe.
Seeing clients’ responses to the Condoit platform has been extremely rewarding for the team. “That ‘aha’ moment when someone realizes they no longer have to dig through drawings or guess what’s up or downstream from a panel — that’s everything,” says Hoppe.
Condoit aims to empower — not replace — field workers, engineers, estimators and facility managers by connecting everyone in those roles with the right information, at the right time, in the simplest way possible.
“We’re putting power back in the hands of the people who actually work with power,” says Hoppe. “The future of electrical work is digital, and we’re proud to help build it.”
Kathleen Farrell and Joe De Sciose are freelance contributors to Business Alabama. She is based in Mobile and he in Birmingham.
This article appears in the May 2025 issue of Business Alabama.
