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Admin42

About Admin42

We build technology for the people technology forgot.

We know how a sentence like that sounds. We mean it anyway — it's the test we apply to every decision.

Our mission

The promise of AI was that powerful tools would reach everyone. In practice, the most capable systems have flowed first to the largest enterprises — the organizations that already had the most resources, the most staff, and the most leverage.

The small school district with one IT person is still on their own. The small manufacturing shop is still patching switches at midnight. The non-profit office manager is still guessing why the WiFi keeps dropping.

Admin42 exists to close that gap. The same grade of operational intelligence the largest companies rely on should be available to organizations of every size.

What we're building.

Admin42 builds trusted AI specialists for the people who keep organizations running. Underneath each one is a single idea: putting AI to work where a wrong answer has real consequences. AI shouldn't be measured by how often it gives an answer, but by how well it knows the limits of what it actually knows. Instead of relying on one model, an Admin42 specialist draws on several, along with local knowledge and your own data. The person in charge makes the final call, and every recommendation is something you can explain, check, and trust.

Networking is where we start, because we know the work and the stakes are plain. The same approach reaches the other mission-critical operations that keep an organization running, one careful specialist at a time. NELDA is our first specialist — and the proving ground for what comes next.

What we believe

  • Principle 01

    AI should recommend, not act unilaterally.

    On a network, the cost of a wrong move is real. NELDA always surfaces a recommendation. A human approves. Then NELDA executes.

  • Principle 02

    Your data should stay yours.

    NELDA runs on-premise. Network telemetry, configurations, and logs do not leave the customer's environment. Privacy is structural, not promised.

  • Principle 03

    Plain language beats jargon.

    The people we serve are not vendors of their own networks; they are stewards of them. Our software speaks their language, not ours.

  • Principle 04

    Build for the long tail.

    Most organizations are not Fortune 500s. They deserve enterprise-grade tools at a price that respects their reality.

These beliefs shape the kind of AI we build. Here's why NELDA is an agentic AI.

Co-Founder

Tom Martinson

Co-Founder & CEO, Admin42

NELDA started as a project Tom built for fun in mid-2024, a way to better automate the network administration work he'd done for years. The turning point came the next summer, on an epic 2,000-mile motorcycle trip with his wife Kelly, now Admin42's co-founder and CFO.

Taking a break from the long ride over fry bread at the Cameron Trading Post, just outside Grand Canyon National Park, the two got to talking the way they always do: about how to make the world a little better. Kelly is the kind one, always thinking about other people. Tom is the analytical one, always looking for the problem to solve. A dreamer and a techie. It's why they make such a good team.

Kelly saw a real business in what Tom had built, and she saw where it could matter most. Plenty of schools have funding for technology but not enough people to manage it day to day, evaluate new tools, and keep up with security. If automation could lighten that load, it could give the people doing the work a better work-life balance. That's when they decided to focus Admin42 on helping rural schools. The paperwork started later that year, and on May 19, 2026, Admin42, Inc. was officially incorporated in Washington, opening the company's doors.

Working from the shadow of Mt. Rainier, Tom leads product, engineering, and the broader vision of bringing operational AI to the long tail of underserved networks.

Working on something we should know about?

Pilots, partnerships, press, or a hard problem to throw at us — we'd like to hear from you.

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