Why The New Platform And Where To Next

When Ratio.City first launched in the summer of 2018, our goal was to self-disrupt my co-founder’s consulting practice. Monika was (and still is) an expert on how to extract the most value from a potential development site based on applicable policies and geometric constraints. She joked that some kid was going to come along, write some software, and put her out of business. We chuckled at first but found ourselves both nodding at the idea of getting there first. From there, we founded Ratio.City Inc.

Our initial offering was a hit with the type of folks who were Monika’s clients: real-estate developers who were looking to buy land in Toronto. We also found great traction with the municipalities that review applications from these developers. We realized that a huge part of the value that we were delivering to customers was in bringing together all the disparate data that is needed to understand development potential. We also noticed that we regularly got these questions from our target customers:

“When will you have these tools available in City X?”

“Can you put our data on Ratio.City’s platform so we can analyse it with your tools?”

As founders, it was gratifying to see that the market was pulling in the direction we wanted to go. We had always envisioned Ratio.City as a global data solution for all the people who build and operate cities—not just real-estate developers. However, our initial technology stack was not built to respond to these questions. We needed to build something new and it would have to scale.

Introducing the New Ratio.City Platform

We have spent the last eight months working on our new urban data engine and adapting our Commercial Real Estate (CRE) tools to be powered by this new engine. It is incredibly exciting to roll it out to customers and we will be doing so in three phases starting in early November 2020.

Phase 1: City Expansion

Our first phase is focused on city expansion. We are launching with support for our CRE tools in Vancouver, in addition to Toronto. Our new engine enables us to rapidly add data sets for new geographies. Perhaps more importantly, our new engine normalizes data into conceptual models that apply across cities and geographies. This enables advanced search, comparisons between cities, and much more. We are already working on the next set of cities!

Phase 2: Data Ingestion Tools for Customers

The second phase will be opening up our new data ingestion tools to our customers so they can extract value from their own data using Ratio.City’s tools and data. Customers will also be able to cross-license data with each other, which will result in a growing ecosystem of data providers and consumers.

Phase 3: APIs

The third phase will be opening up our Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) to customers. This will enable customers to build their own software using Ratio.City data and analytics. I am very curious to see what other people will build when they are able to use Ratio.City’s Urban Data Engine in ways we haven’t even considered!

The Future of Ratio.City

With the launch of our new platform, we’re realizing the vision that Monika and I have always had for Ratio.City: the information city builders need when they need it. But we couldn’t have gotten here without you. Keep the feedback coming and we’ll keep pushing ourselves to deliver.

If you’re interested in learning more about our platform, reach out to hello@ratio.city for a live demo of our new features!