Jacob Panagopoulos — Founder, Sentel
My mom has been in HR for 25 years. Last year she was sitting at the kitchen table working an FMLA case for one of her employees, and I was sitting next to her — about to start my last year of school. She kept flipping between three browser tabs, a spreadsheet, and a binder of forms. The case was being “managed” by an outsourced FMLA provider her company pays for. The provider had missed several deadlines. She caught the misses. They didn't.
That night I went down a rabbit hole. The University of Hawaii had just published a study showing 88% of HR FMLA spreadsheets contain errors — and that the average HR manager personally tracks 40+ deadlines per active case in their head. Mom was not failing. Spreadsheets were failing her.
Sentel is what came out of that.
The HR people building this with me are the veterans. I bring something different to the team.
A year of deep research
I have spent the last year inside 29 CFR Part 825, DOL Wage and Hour opinion letters, FMLA case law, and state leave statutes. I read regulations the way most people read novels. The Sentel compliance engine is what I built from that reading.
Special education teaching
Before this, I taught special ed. Spec-ed teachers run an Individualized Education Plan for every student — a binding legal document with deadlines, accommodations, and parent-notice requirements. The mental model is the same as FMLA case management. I have built tracking systems for this kind of work before.
Kinesiology + pediatric PT background
My undergrad is kinesiology. I worked in pediatric physical therapy — another field where documentation, medical certifications, and accommodation logic decide whether a clinic survives an audit. Reading the WH-380 form felt familiar from day one.
I am the customer
My mom is one of the people I am building this for. If Sentel does not work for her, it does not ship. That is the only check I trust.
Every workflow in Sentel is engineered against the actual text of 29 CFR Part 825 and tested against real, in-progress FMLA cases — not hypothetical ones.
Tested with live cases, not whiteboards
Active HR leaders running real cases
Every Founding Partner brings me the hardest FMLA case from their last 30 days. We walk through it together inside Sentel. Whatever the system does not handle gets fixed that week. That is the only product roadmap I trust.
Every answer cites a regulation
Sourced, not generated
Sentel is grounded on the actual text of 29 CFR Part 825, state leave statutes (CFRA, PDL, PFL, others), and DOL opinion letters. Every recommendation links to the regulation it came from. You can click, read the source, and defend the decision in an audit. The AI does not invent answers — it surfaces the ones already in the regs.
No AI guessing on math
Deadline math is deterministic
FMLA dates, business-day calculations, federal holidays through 2028, and rolling-backward 12-month entitlement math are not generated by an AI model. They run on plain code in UTC. Same inputs always produce the same outputs. The AI sits on top of that math — it never replaces it.
I am building Sentel with HR leaders who have actually run FMLA cases, alongside an employment attorney who has litigated the kind of claims the rest of the industry is designed to avoid talking about. That is the team.
The result is software that does not just record what you did. It tells you what to do next. It flags the backdated leave-start date the doctor just handed you. It reminds you to check in with the employee on Day 30, Day 60, and Day 70 — the proactive touchpoints most HR teams forget until the regulatory clock has already run out. It runs California CFRA concurrent with federal FMLA by default so you do not accidentally grant 24 weeks instead of 12.
The brief was simple: build the system my mom should have had on the night I watched her do this work by hand.
Bring the FMLA case that has been keeping you up. We will run it through Sentel together in 10 minutes. You will see the gaps in both Sentel and your current process — and you will leave with a timeline you can actually defend, whether you become a customer or not.