UrbanFootprint Raises $11.5 Million Series A to Help Businesses and Cities Plan for Future Climate, Housing and Mobility Challenges

BERKELEY, Calif., Feb. 12, 2020 /PRNewswire/ -- UrbanFootprint, the leading location intelligence and urban planning software, today announced that it has raised $11.5 million in Series A to advance its offerings and grow its customer base of cities, urban planners, and companies across the energy, mobility, and real estate sectors. Joining early investor Social Capital, Valo Ventures led this round of financing, alongside continued investment from Social Capital and new partner Radicle Impact.

As nearly 70% of the world's population is expected to live in urban areas by 2050, both government and business are turning to UrbanFootprint as the ultimate tool to understand cities -- everything from where people live, work, and commute, to zoning, physical and environmental conditions, infrastructure and more. Combining data, analysis, and advanced scenario planning, UrbanFootprint dramatically improves the toolset available to cities and urban planners to design more sustainable, equitable and resilient communities. It also supports mobility, energy, insurance, real estate, and other emerging and established industries with a comprehensive platform of actionable insights and ground-level data to navigate cities and urban markets. For instance, UrbanFootprint can help businesses plan their expansions, identify where to devote resources, and understand current and future economic, social and environmental implications across markets.

"Businesses across every major industry are realizing that to succeed in cities, you need to understand them," said Joe DiStefano, CEO of UrbanFootprint. "By creating easy access to essential planning data and analyses, UrbanFootprint offers a new solution for anyone focused on cities or urban markets to build more efficiently and sustainably."

"We are extremely grateful for the incredible support we've received from experienced investors, Valo Ventures, Social Capital, and Radicle Impact, who bring deep experience and purpose in creating a brighter, sustainable future for all," said Peter Calthorpe, Co-Founder of UrbanFootprint. "Their expertise will be invaluable as we continue to scale our platform and bring even more urban insights to cities, urban planners, and companies working and competing in urban markets."

Compared to traditional urban planning tools that are siloed, costly and time-consuming, UrbanFootprint streamlines the process through a single collaborative platform that makes it easy to map and evaluate existing conditions, build and test future scenarios, and analyze an unprecedented array of relevant impacts. The platform serves up thousands of essential data sets covering land use and real estate, transportation systems, environmental resources, climate and hazard risks, health, and socio-demographic characteristics. Models track scenario performance in real-time and the industry's most advanced user interface enables planners and enterprises to search and evaluate nearly all U.S. locations with ease.

UrbanFootprint is already being used by hundreds of planners, designers, and engineers across private planning firms, cities, and businesses, who want to leverage the power of data and analysis to build smarter, evaluate urban markets, and plan for resilience. Gehl, a global urban strategy and design consultancy, is using UrbanFootprint to analyze how cities and micromobility companies can target deployment of bikeshare and scooters to neighborhoods where these options will have the most impact based on job accessibility, open space and neighborhood amenities.

"At Gehl we're a bridge between city governments and the companies that shape public space, like developers and mobility providers," said Blaine Merker, Partner, Managing Director, US at Gehl. "UrbanFootprint helps us translate cities' strategic goals on climate, equity and health to inform products and services offered by the private sector. We're using UrbanFootprint to shape these emerging markets for the public interest."

Focusing on resilience, Pacific Gas and Electric Company (PG&E), one of the nation's largest combined gas and electric utilities, is also using UrbanFootprint to better understand the impacts of heat waves on their infrastructure and distribution network, and to analyze how this may affect key risk and resilience factors for the communities they serve.

"PG&E's Climate Resilience team is working to ensure that PG&E is building a resilient system that will be able to continue to provide safe, affordable, and reliable energy to its customers amidst the growing risks of climate change," said Heather Rock, Climate Resilience Chief at PG&E. "To that end, we are using forward-looking climate data to better inform how we plan and protect our infrastructure, employees, customers, and communities in which we serve. UrbanFootprint is an important partner to us as we seek data and tools that allow us to assess and mitigate these risks in a thoughtful way."

Investor Commentary

Scott Tierney, Managing Partner at Valo Ventures said,"We invested in UrbanFootprint because their cloud-delivered software provides urban planners, corporations, policy makers, and local governments access to useful models of the built environment, with analytical tools and visualization to make data-informed decisions concerning environment impact, climate risk, property development, zoning, transportation, infrastructure, public spaces, and more, to improve the quality of life and return on investment."

"Cities are superstructures for culture, lifestyles, aspirations, and well-being - the real "social networks" in our lives," said Jay Zaveri, Partner at Social Capital. "Since 2018, UrbanFootprint has helped private and civic planners, mobility and energy companies execute nearly 4,000  projects in over 700 cities in the U.S., providing answers for complex scenarios in a matter of hours. This is a phenomenal effort as we move to seven billion urban citizens by 2050, with the urgent need of this decade being resilience and preparedness for urban systems."

"Land use planning in cities is a key leverage point in our collective efforts to combat climate change and promote social equity and economic growth," said Catha Groot, Partner at Radicle Impact. "UrbanFootprint's powerful software -- built on decades of work by the founding team at the frontier of scenario planning and "new urbanism" -- enables decision-makers to better understand the impacts of land use and development plans, invites new participants to have a seat at the table and drives to better outcomes. We're excited to support the UrbanFootprint team in their effort to build a technology company with such catalytic impact potential."

About UrbanFootprint
UrbanFootprint is cloud-based Urban Intelligence software that delivers insight to government, enterprise, and academic institutions in urban planning, finance, mobility, sustainability, policy making, healthcare, and disaster preparedness. UrbanFootprint streamlines urban planning and mobility decisions with actionable data for all U.S. locations. Map, measure, and analyze current and future land use scenarios with thousands of cleaned and curated datasets. For more information on UrbanFootprint, please visit: https://urbanfootprint.com/

Contact:
Molly Hendriksen
[email protected] 
646-200-5303

SOURCE UrbanFootprint

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