AcreSeal Joins Syracuse University Military Founders Lab to Advance Cryptographic Pole Documentation

AcreSeal, a product of San Antonio-based Ectropy Solutions LLC, has been accepted into the Military Founders Lab 26C Black Founders Track at the D'Aniello Institute for Veterans and Military Families (IVMF) at Syracuse University. The cohort kicks off the week of September 14, 2026.

The Military Founders Lab is an entrepreneurship program for veteran and military-connected founders, pairing a structured curriculum with advisor engagement and a peer cohort. For AcreSeal, it arrives at the point where the product has to move from a working evidence engine to a business with design partners.

What AcreSeal actually does

AcreSeal is forensic evidence infrastructure for the gap between what a landowner observes about a distribution pole and what anyone can later confirm about that observation. When a landowner, contractor or field inspector submits a record through the free reporting form, three things happen:

1. Capture. The photo is hashed on the submitting device at the moment of capture.
2. Server recomputation. AcreSeal recomputes the SHA-256 from the stored bytes on its own server and rejects a record whose digest does not match. The digest and the GPS fix are then locked — the database refuses any later change to them, so a subsequent edit is detectable.
3. Open checking. Anyone holding a copy of the file can recompute the digest themselves with standard tools such as shasum and openssl, with no account and no help from us.

Two limits are worth stating in the same breath. A hash binds content, not time — third-party attested time covers reports a utility has sealed into a work order, not ordinary landowner intake. And the record is served from AcreSeal's own infrastructure, so the check is independent of us while the hosting is not.

That distinction is the whole product. Unauthenticated field photos often collapse under a carrier's wear-and-tear exclusion or in litigation, not because nobody took a picture, but because nothing connects the picture to a moment, a place and an unaltered file.

The Texas regulatory context

HB 144 (89th Legislature, Regular Session, 2025) added Tex. Util. Code §38.103, which took effect September 1, 2025. It has each electric cooperative, electric utility and municipally owned utility that distributes electric energy to the public submit a distribution pole management and inspection plan to the Public Utility Commission of Texas.

The element AcreSeal speaks to is Tex. Util. Code §38.103(b)(5): the plan must describe processes for documenting and responding to a report or complaint made by a landowner regarding the condition or repair of a distribution pole. The statute does not tell a utility how fast to act — §38.103(b)(4) has the utility state its own estimated timeline — and it imposes nothing at all on a utility's insurers.

The recurring filing is a single annual one. Under §38.103(c), an entity with a plan on file submits an update not later than May 1 of each year, covering its compliance with the plan's objectives, the costs of implementing the plan to date, and its pole inspection results.

These filing dates come from 16 TAC §25.63, adopted by the Public Utility Commission of Texas on 2026-07-30 under PUCT Project No. 59431 and effective 2026-08-19. The enacted statute sets no plan-filing schedule of its own — Tex. Util. Code §38.103 requires the plan and the annual update, not a revision cycle — so these dates rest on the rule's authority, not the statute's. The rule was adopted with changes to the text published 2026-03-27; AcreSeal is completing review of the adopted text against prior published materials, and any changes will be noted in a forthcoming correction brief.

AcreSeal sits underneath that, on the landowner side of it. A utility assembling a plan has to describe a complaint process; a landowner filing a complaint has to be able to show what they saw. The same record serves both, which is the only reason a free landowner tool and a utility compliance product belong in one system.

What the program supports

The D'Aniello Institute has supported thousands of military-connected entrepreneurs, and the Lab opens access to Syracuse University's advisor and institutional network. AcreSeal is pre-commercial, and the curriculum lands squarely on the work in front of us: outreach to Texas utilities, electric cooperatives and municipally owned utilities, and to property and casualty carriers writing utility infrastructure risk as design partners.

AcreSeal was previously named a San Antonio Tech Fuel 2026 Semi-Finalist, and has submitted an application to the Austin Technology Incubator.

We have also opened academic research inquiries with the Thurgood Marshall School of Law at Texas Southern University and St. Mary's University School of Law. The subject is narrow, and worth stating precisely: AcreSeal records are structured to lower the cost and friction of authentication under Federal Rules of Evidence 901 and 902(13)–(14). Two limits come with that. Those rules still require a certification by a qualified person plus pre-trial notice to the opposing party — a hash is not self-executing, and no vendor can make a record self-authenticating by itself. And they go to authentication only; hearsay, relevance and other objections survive independently. Admissibility remains a determination for the tribunal.

Where the company actually is

AcreSeal is a pre-commercial company focused on pilot letters of intent with property and casualty carriers and on design-partner engagements with Texas utilities. No external tenant has run the platform in production yet, and we would rather say so than round the number up. The evidence engine is live and the verification path is open to anyone; the commercial book is ahead of us, not behind us.

A single real record, with a verification recipe a stranger can run, is published at the AcreSeal case study. If you would rather check the claim than read it, that is the place to start — acreseal.com/verify/case-study. Landowners can document a pole hazard on their own property through the free reporting form.