Since 2017, Urban-x has invested in dozens of civic-improvement start-ups. Here are three of the most promising:
A ROAD TO BETTER STREETS
“In 10 years, more than half of all vehicles on the road will be autonomous,” says Mark Desantis, EX-CEO of Roadbotics, the start-up he still serves as a senior advisor. “Today’s five-year-olds will never drive a car – it would be akin to us riding a horse.” Based in Pittsburgh, Roadbotics has just closed its first
Series A round of financing, landing a healthy US$7.5 million from Radical Ventures, a Us$350-million Toronto-based fund focused on AI technologies. But Roadbotics isn’t selling autonomous vehicles – what it’s selling is better roads. The company’s app-based premise: using the cameras in smartphones positioned on the windshields of public or commercial vehicles – think street-sweepers and delivery trucks – to take images of thoroughfares while pixelating faces, licence plates and other private details. Its AI component simultaneously scans this imagery for telltale signs of potholes and other damage – what Desantis calls “road cancer.”
Road upkeep is both a universal problem – the American Society for Civil Engineers pegs the cost of simply maintaining existing U.S. thoroughfares at US$1 trillion – and a huge opportunity. And if autonomous, co-shared vehicles are the future, road quality could affect carmakers directly, the damage caused by shoddy asphalt no longer absorbed by car insurers but by the firms operating the vehicles. Already, Roadbotics has 160 clients – from municipalities to road engineering firms – in 24 U.S. states and two boroughs in London, England. “We’re at the front end of the autonomous revolution,” says Desantis, who predicts that his nascent industry could be valued at US$7 trillion by 2050. roadbotics.com
THE NEWEST POWER PLAYERS
To describe the gist of Blueprint Power, it’s hard to beat the start-up’s own slogan: “We turn buildings into power plants,” a model of crystal-clear messaging. As a rule, buildings tend to generate more energy than they need; rather than wasting it, however, owners and operators will be able to use Blueprint Power’s software platforms to manage their energy loads and onsite generation more efficiently as well as sell excess electricity to the power grid. Currently, the company is testing its tech in New York City, where both the state and the city have established clean-energy incentivization programs. In the near future, more office, retail and residential buildings will run on solar or other types of Internet-connected green electricity, placing Blueprint Power ahead of the game.
The company (whose CEO, Robyn Beavers, is pictured above) is an example of an Urban-x start-up that interacts directly with governing bodies and utilities. “Energy is a highly regulated space,” says Liz Sisson, Urban-x’s project manager. “It was important for us to make sure that the team understood that, that it might take a while to try to push government to be more accepting of, say, putting solar batteries on buildings.” blueprintpower.com
AI FOR THE PEOPLE
When a tech start-up says it can read the emotions of a public place, as Qucit does in a website video, it naturally raises a flag. The immediate assumption: cameras – and lots of them – capturing all manner of smiles, slumped shoulders, wild hand gesticulations. But Qucit relies on much richer data than what a lens can capture: It collects information by running detailed, one-on-one questionnaires.
“We believe in human interaction,” says Qucit CEO Raphaël Cherrier, “and only in AI that is helpful to humans.”
Comprising hundreds of questions, the survey is proprietary material. But the basic queries include examples like “Is where you are standing right now beautiful? Is it comfortable? Is it stressful?” Qucit then overlays the answers, as the diagram above suggests, onto publicly available data about the site, such as its plant life, public furniture, air pollution levels and relationship to nearby roads and buildings. Ultimately it puts its algorithm to use to determine how the subjective words “beautiful” and “comfortable” correspond with the objective facts of the space. One day, Cherrier predicts, the algorithm will be able to scan any street imagery and understand the experiential quality of a site.
“The value proposition is to help real estate developers build more livable spaces and to improve the quality of life in cities,” he says. “And we want decision-makers to have a better view of what citizens really want.” The firm is already active in its native France. In Paris, its data was used to make Place de la Nation friendlier to pedestrians; in Versailles, Qucit is helping that city make its business district more appealing so that it attracts people after work hours. The company is also working on numerous side projects, including one that gauges how to better calibrate bike-share programs: Vancouver’s Mobi, for instance, is using Qucit’s rebalancing software to move bikes around to parts of the city where cyclists need them most. qucit.com