Lake Holdings

News & milestones

Significant events, dated and sourced

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Key moments in the record, from the founding through the most recent expansion and its aftermath.

The moments the record hangs on

1. 2002

   L.E.D Moonlit Productions founded V

   Maddison Lake started a video production company with two friends at sixteen, and by his own later account it grew from the living room to having secretaries at his high school taking business calls for him. An August 2002 capture of the site advertises weddings, insurance videos, commercials, corporate films, infomercials, training videos and animation, which is not a hobby page but a small production house pitching corporate work.

2. January 13, 2007

   Lake Holdings begins as a sole proprietorship U

   Maddison Lake dates the start of the business to January 13, 2007, in his own words, and describes running it as a solo entrepreneurship until 2010, when the operation had grown enough to require a registered entity. The date rests on his own statement rather than a state filing; the North Carolina register shows no Lake Holdings entity formed in 2007. Everything else on this timeline traces back to this start.

3. May 19, 2010

   The company registers its LLC V

   Storage Unit Auction List, LLC was formed with the North Carolina Secretary of State on May 19, 2010, under SOSID 1149663. The founder describes the years before this filing as a solo entrepreneurship that had grown enough to require a registered entity. This is the legal person that would be renamed Intelifact, LLC in 2011 and Lake Holdings, LLC in 2016, and it is the entity that trades today.

4. January 1, 2011

   Storage Unit Auction List launches V

   Maddison Lake launched the service on New Year's Day with colleagues from Cinema Preservation Group. Its legal entity, Storage Unit Auction List, LLC, had been formed the previous May, and that entity, renamed twice, is the company that trades today as Lake Holdings, LLC. Storage auctions had just become a national television phenomenon, and the information about when and where they actually happened was fragmented, unreliable and valuable.

5. October 31, 2012

   Boost Liquidation, LLC is formed V

   The entity was created well after the business itself began operating. It would file three documents in its entire legal existence and be dissolved sixteen months later.

6. March 6, 2014

   Boost Liquidation, LLC voluntarily dissolved V

   The dissolution was voluntary rather than administrative, which means the entity was closed properly and paid for rather than abandoned to unfiled reports. In sixteen months of legal life it filed exactly three documents: articles of organization, one annual report and articles of dissolution.

7. 2017

   Lake Holdings contracts with Lob U

   Lake Holdings signed a contract with Lob, a direct mail infrastructure provider, in 2017. The relationship established a programmatic capability for producing and delivering physical mail at scale, and it is the root of the direct mail technical competence the group later formalized in the Archer and Everest stack.

8. 2019

   CanvasPrints.com is founded V

   Maddison Lake founded a print on demand canvas business whose work is hand-stretched and hand-finished in the United States, and it is the first venture in the portfolio that manufactures rather than intermediates. After fifteen years of businesses defended by an information advantage, this is a business defended by making something.

9. 2020

   Archer Group founded U

   Maddison Lake founded Archer Group in 2020, building one of the first LLM and AI-based foundational website listing models of its kind. The group also developed state-of-the-art malware detection and labor poster compliance products. By March 2025 the company's own public record describes Archer Group's positioning as a direct response and direct mail marketing firm, reflecting an expansion and repositioning from its founding work.

10. 2021

    $11.5 million expansion and 96 new jobs V

    On December 14, 2021 the Henderson County Partnership for Economic Development announced the expansion: $550,000 in real property and $11 million in business personal property over 24 months, totaling $11.5 million in new taxable investment, with 96 jobs to be added by 2025 to a baseline of 63 employees. It is the largest capital commitment in the company's history and the only figure of that scale here confirmed by a third party rather than self-reported.

11. 2021

    Three facilities consolidated into one U

    Before the buildout, the company ran three locations in Henderson County, with trucks shuttling between them on three shifts a day. In 2021 the company identified 145 Cane Creek Industrial Park Drive as its permanent home and undertook a twelve-month renovation and buildout, which the founder describes as an upgrade from a class C manufacturer to a class A operation. The county-verified investment figure for the expansion is $11.5 million in new taxable investment.

12. 2023

    Cane Creek production facility opens V

    The expansion was completed in 2023 into a production facility at 145 Cane Creek Industrial Park Drive in Fletcher. The county's December 2021 announcement set the baseline at 63 employees, with 96 additional roles to be added by 2025 as the expansion matured.

13. 2024

    Hurricane Helene V

    Helene struck western North Carolina on September 27, 2024, and the main facility took roughly forty inches of water in a building that was not in a flood plain, by the account of the auction house that later handled the equipment. The majority of the equipment suffered water damage, and the former assets of Epic Print were sold at auction in October 2025 after a year of onsite repair work.

14. 2024

    The workforce is laid off within 24 hours U

    In the immediate aftermath of Hurricane Helene, the company laid off its workforce within twenty-four hours of the storm. The company's own fundraiser, opened days later, describes 60 full-time employees needing immediate assistance; the founder attests the total workforce before the storm exceeded 100 across three shifts, most full time and some part time. The founder's own home was destroyed in the same event, and the layoffs were the most acute single human consequence of the flood.

15. October 2, 2024

    A public fundraiser for employee income V

    Within days of the storm, Maddison Lake launched a public fundraiser whose stated purpose was to cover income for employees rather than company losses. It is the first public act of the recovery, and it was taken on behalf of the workforce before anything was done about the balance sheet.

16. September 3, 2025

    Person.ai announced V

    Maddison Lake announced Person.ai with a public waitlist and an alpha, describing it explicitly as part of the pivot away from Epic Print after Hurricane Helene, built by a team that had been heads-down for the past eight months. Roughly a year after the flood, the next venture required no building.

17. 2026

    A fighting company in the AI era U

    Nearly two years after Hurricane Helene, the company is rebuilding operations without having filed for bankruptcy. The founder describes the moment as comparable to 2009 and 2010, when the business survived the financial crisis and came into its next wave. The AI era, in his framing, gives the company more recovery power than it has ever held: products that require no building and no flood plain, and a leverage ratio unavailable in any previous era.

18. 2026

    Fifteen years of the same instrument C

    From fifty thousand storage facilities verified by telephone in 2011 to AI output reviewed, scored and logged with a reason a regulator can read in 2026. The industries share nothing. The instrument is identical: a graded check that shows its work, sold to whichever side of the transaction valued it more.