Before Wojciech Kalembasa sold software for walking through apartments, he sold mortgages to people who often preferred to speak Polish. About 95 percent of his clients were Polish, he recalled in a 2013 interview. Many came through his mother, a realtor. The work rewarded a skill he had spent childhood Saturdays maintaining, when other children had sleepovers and he went to Polish school.
Kalembasa had moved from Kraków to Chicago at age one. Polish was the language at home, in the kitchen and on summer trips back to Poland. For a time, even his Chicago public-school classroom mixed Polish and English. Then his family moved to Park Ridge in fourth grade, and he found himself in what he called “a totally different world.” His English needed work. Extra reading and writing support helped. Saturday classes at St. John Brebeuf in Niles kept the other language alive.
Years later, that bilingual childhood became a commercial bridge. He could explain a complicated loan in the language his clients trusted. The mortgage business also put him close to property listings, where a different translation problem kept appearing. Rooms were flattened into still photographs. A buyer could inspect the numbers from anywhere, but not the feeling of moving through the space.
“With virtual technology, customers can experience what it's like to walk through a space, before ever setting foot in it.”Wojciech Kalembasa
The room was the missing argument
Kalembasa used earnings from mortgage work to fund a better answer: indoor 360-degree tours. The enterprise began around 2010 and marks 2011 as its founding year. Its original name, Lights Camera Pixels, had the cheerful literalism of a wedding videographer's van. LCP360 was sharper. It said what the work did.
He started it with his brother, Tom Kalembasa, and friends. The early company sold the work as a service. It photographed, stitched and published spaces for clients including universities, hotels and venues. Kalembasa has described those years in three words: “the wild wild west.” There is no need to improve the phrase. Anyone who has assembled a young company's sales process while also doing the actual work will recognize the terrain.
One important break came after months of trying to reach Google. The eventual call was candid: “You are not as big as we would like you to be, but let's give it a shot.” LCP became part of Google's Business Photos program and grew into a Street View agency. The call is a neat founder anecdote because the romance arrives late. First came the unanswered outreach and a small team learning to make itself useful.
The useful sequence
The tool inside the service
The decisive move was not another camera. It was the software behind the camera. Creating tours at scale required the same set of actions again and again: organize scenes, connect them, publish them to Google, host them, embed them and watch how people used them. LCP built Panoskin internally to make that workflow less cumbersome. Then it offered the tool to other photographers.
By early 2018, Panoskin users had published 42,000 tours containing 530,000 individual scenes. The tours had been viewed 1.5 million times, while the scenes had recorded 5.1 million views. Kalembasa called the product “Google Street View for indoors,” a description clean enough to do the selling by itself.
The company had crossed an important border. A service business earns again by repeating the work. A software product earns by making repetition easier for other people. Kalembasa later named Panoskin's launch as LCP Media's most significant achievement because it “pivoted LCP from a service company to a prop-tech company.” That sentence is the strategic core of his story.
Google made the shift visible on a larger stage. At the 2017 Street View Summit in Tokyo, Panoskin was announced as Street View Workflow Ready software. Kalembasa and LCP's chief technology officer, Tom Chomiak, presented the publisher there. A company once judged small enough to merit a warning had built something the larger ecosystem could use.
A model unit is only a model
The next problem was specificity. A beautifully staged model apartment can suggest a lifestyle, but it cannot show the exact bedroom window in Unit 810. Kalembasa kept returning to the renter's practical questions. Is there a dog park? What is the rooftop like? Which view will I wake up to? The distinction between selling an archetype and showing an available home became a product brief.
In 2022, LCP360 became LCP Media, while Panoskin became TourBuilder. The names widened as the business widened. TourBuilder Pro covered professionally captured property tours. TourBuilder Go let on-site teams capture individual units with a phone, a Ricoh Theta camera and a guided app. The content could be processed, attached to floor plans and matched with real-time availability from property-management systems.
In a live demonstration that year, Kalembasa showed the workflow from an ordinary room. The app paired with the camera, counted down, captured a scene and asked what room it was in. The operator could move to the next spot. Editing, patching and connecting happened elsewhere. The clever part was less cinematic than a flying drone. It was removing the small technical decisions that prevented a leasing employee from completing the job.
Around the platform grew analytics, live guided sharing, AI-generated short clips and integrations. TourBuilder Connect let a leasing agent and prospect occupy the same digital walkthrough while speaking from different places. During the abrupt turn toward remote leasing in 2020, these features moved from useful to expected. Kalembasa's advice at the time was notably vendor-agnostic: properties needed this kind of content, whether they bought it from LCP or elsewhere.
The team in the photograph
Software stories tend to reduce themselves to product releases. LCP's better artifact is a team photograph. When Panoskin's counter reached one million scenes, everyone gathered in front of the screen. Lead salesman Tom Lisak was missing because he was on a call with Greystar. So the team took his picture separately, and Pat Ash edited him into the original.
It is a small, funny act of corporate continuity: the milestone deserved a portrait, the customer deserved the call, and Photoshop could reconcile the two. Kalembasa says his biggest lesson from building LCP was that it takes a team. The altered group photo turns the familiar sentiment into evidence.
“My biggest lesson learned is that it takes a team. We wouldn't have gotten to this point without the great team we've built.”Wojciech Kalembasa
The team expanded beyond Chicago. In 2022 LCP opened an office in Kraków, the city Kalembasa had left as a toddler. Engineers and production staff joined there. It is tempting to make the circle too perfect, but the plain version is satisfying enough: a bilingual child grew into an American founder whose company eventually built across both places.
The office culture kept a sense of play. Company recaps record cornhole, Halloween costumes and a barbecue dunk tank reserved for Wojciech and Tom. None of this proves that work was easy. It suggests the people doing it understood that a company history needs some scenes that would never survive a quarterly deck.
The door into Yardi
On February 26, 2025, Yardi acquired LCP Media. The terms were not disclosed. The industrial logic was easy to see. Yardi already supplied property-management software and RentCafe websites. LCP brought the visual layer: tours, photography, renderings and the tools connecting them to a renter's search. An apartment listing could now carry more of the experience inside the same software ecosystem.
Kalembasa called the sale a major milestone. He framed the next chapter around greater resources, continued innovation and a better experience for clients and residents. His public announcement also carried the emotion of ending a fourteen-year founder chapter built with his brother, friends, employees and customers.
The practical lesson is not “build a virtual-tour company.” Markets do not repeat so politely. The lesson is to notice what customers cannot properly see, perform the missing work, and observe which parts of that work recur. LCP began by making rooms visible. Its durable product came from making the machinery behind those rooms visible to itself.
There is also the quieter lesson of translation. Polish school helped a young broker explain mortgages. Photography helped distant customers understand space. Software helped a scattered network of people create and distribute the imagery. Integration helped leasing teams put it where decisions happen. Kalembasa's career has moved through several languages, only some of them spoken.
A room on the internet remains a compromise. You cannot test the afternoon light or hear the elevator from a browser. But you can arrive with better questions. Kalembasa built a company around narrowing that distance. Fourteen years later, the browser door opened into Yardi.