Press release: Geovation welcomes a new generation of disruptive property and location data businesses

Geovation has expanded its programme to support three new PropTech start-ups. This is the first time the programme will back PropTech disruptors and follows news that HMLR will begin to collaborate with OS to stimulate the innovative use of land and property technology and data through Geovation.

The PropTech businesses will be joining the programme alongside three GeoTech start-ups.

Business Minister Lord Prior said:

Building more affordable homes is central to the Government’s commitment to creating an economy that works for everyone and the partnership between HM Land Registry and Ordnance Survey is a new and exciting chapter of this.

The Geovation Programme encourages and supports the growing number of new start-ups driving innovation in the housing sector. Geovation is now supporting six new PropTech and GeoTech companies to develop new technologies to propel the UK towards becoming a global leader in the land and property market.

The PropTech businesses are:

Rentr tracks UK local authority licensing schemes for rental properties, identifying properties that meet regulated safety standards. Landlords and agents can audit entire portfolios broken down by postcode in seconds and review the daily status changes of individual properties.

Orbital Witness uses satellite imagery, property ownership data and cutting edge artificial intelligence (AI) to conduct due diligence on properties to assist conveyancers, by highlighting areas of risk early.

AskPorter is an AI machine learning messaging platform that optimises property and facilities management by reducing administration and management costs while improving customer satisfaction. The platform uses an intuitive conversational interface that enables a chatbot to answer common questions.

The GeoTech businesses are:

FlowX offers a low-cost solution to traffic congestion, and the pollution this causes, by providing object classification algorithms to exciting sensory data. This is achieved by integrating data from existing infrastructure sensors and then applying machine learning to give the ability to react to congestion before it even happens.

Safe & the City aims to build a safer community one step at a time by creating a GPS app that uses evidence informed data and crowdsourced geotagged information to paint a picture of safe routes and what streets to walk down.

Explaain reinvents the online article. Most journalists put the most noteworthy information first and leave context and background for later. Explaain allows journalists to include more of the research that doesn’t usually make it into a final article. They recently used their technology to run GE2017.com – a voting preference app that had more than 2 million completed surveys in the run-up to this year’s general election. They will be developing location-aware alerts and reminders, and geospatial context for cards.

John Abbott, Director of Digital, Data and Technology at HM Land Registry says:

With our support these start-ups have the opportunity to revolutionise the technology that underpins the property sector and create data-driven services that will make property related transactions simpler, faster and cheaper for everyone.

During the first six months of the programme, participants will develop their ideas to prototype stage. They will benefit from £10,000 of funding and commit to spending twenty hours per week on their project. At this point the prototype will be assessed for its commercial viability. If the Geovation team decides it has viability, the following six months will be spent creating a product and launching it, assisted with a further £10,000 funding.

Alex Wrottesley, Head of Geovation, says:

We’re very excited to be working with these businesses. The programme offers an exceptional launchpad for any new business in the PropTech or GeoTech markets and we’re looking forward to giving this new group our full support.