Company
Our story
Komod.ai started with a phone call. A friend of twenty-five years described a problem he kept seeing in the commercial real estate back office: the close done by hand, one spreadsheet at a time, and money slipping through it. Sam Luetters had spent years building AI inside real businesses, where it had to earn its keep on a P&L. The question was whether that work could run a commercial real estate close.
It could. Komod.ai was shaped from day one by a working controller at a leading real estate firm, who knew exactly where the close breaks: the missed escalation, the CAM charge nobody billed, the bank line nobody could place. Sam brought together the engineering team and drove the product from idea to a live close.
People manage the properties. Komod.ai devours the paperwork.
Sam Luetters on LinkedIn (opens in a new tab), Co-Founder and CEO
Sam Luetters runs Komod.ai: product, go-to-market, and the first call for every customer.
He has spent fifteen years building and running commercial organizations with full P&L ownership on three continents. At Wayfair he led the Salesforce transformation for the commercial business and built the CastleGate Forwarding sales organization, and stood on stage with Niraj Shah to talk about how. Before that he turned around an unprofitable international cycling business, founded its APAC center from scratch, and doubled international revenue with a direct-to-consumer line.
At Glowforge he put AI into a working sales team and rebuilt revenue operations around it. For the last three years, through St Lue Consulting, he has built AI systems inside operating businesses, where they had to earn their keep on a real P&L. The Komod problem walked in through that work: a controller closing a year of backlog with a spreadsheet and a highlighter.
He lives in Trumbull, Connecticut, with his wife, two sons and their French bulldog, Blue.
Contact: [email protected] · samluetters.com (opens in a new tab)
James J. Duplessie on LinkedIn (opens in a new tab), Co-Founder
James Duplessie has spent 35 years as a hedge fund manager, principally focused on the debt of financially distressed companies.
He began as an investment banker at Plaza Securities, the Asher Edelman companies, and joined O'Connor & Associates in 1991. At UBS, following its acquisition of O'Connor, he was Executive Director and co-managed a distressed debt fund with peak assets under management of over $1 billion.
In 2001 he co-founded Epic Asset Management, a distressed debt fund that Citigroup acquired in 2008. He then served as Managing Director running distressed strategies at CITI and at Napier Park Global Capital.
He has served on company boards, including Consolidated Hydro (CHI Energy, after its 1997 reorganization) and Satélites Mexicanos (Satmex), and on creditors' committees in major restructurings, including Texas Petrochemicals, Trico Marine and Edison Mission Energy.
In 2019 he co-founded Pangea Blockchain Fund, an early seed investor in Axie Infinity. The fund's net asset value rose 230% in 2021, per its audited annual report. Investors have received more than they invested, per the liquidator's published reports, and the fund is winding down in an orderly way under a Liechtenstein liquidator.
He is a co-founder of Komod.ai, an AI close platform for commercial real estate, and lives in Miami.
Education: JD, Wake Forest University School of Law; MBA, Tulane University; BA Economics, Washington and Lee University.
He lives in Florida with his dog, Kona; his children live nearby.
Contact: [email protected]