Smart city design and planning platform VU.CITY has secured a series A multi-million-pound investment from Ramboll to help model the future our cities using digital twin technology
The engineering and design consultancy joins existing shareholder Grosvenor Hill Ventures – the technology investment subsidiary of global real estate advisory firm Savills – and GIA Surveyors.
Over the past three years, VU.CITY has been helping architects, developers, planners and local authorities across the UK and Ireland make better decisions on the future of our cities with proposed development using interactive 3D digital city models.
The investment from Ramboll will help VU.CITY to become a marketplace for data and solution providers to inform the development of the best possible cities, whilst scaling into new markets, geographies, and industry verticals.
‘Helping create better cities for the future’
VU.CITY CEO Jamie Holmes said: “We’ve always believed VU.CITY has almost limitless potential in helping create better cities for the future and the investment from Ramboll marks the beginning of the next stage of our growth.
“The ability for us to access Ramboll’s knowledge as designers, engineers, architects and consultants working in cities all over the world will be of huge benefit to our customers.
“Ramboll also brings a strong innovation portfolio and we are delighted to bring their generative design real estate platform SiteSolve into the VU.CITY marketplace as one of the early contributors.”
‘Digital twin technologies as a crucial tool to support the development of sustainable and liveable cities’
Mathew Riley from Ramboll also commented: “We see city-wide digital twin technologies as a crucial tool to support the development of sustainable and liveable cities. VU.CITY brings incredible transparency to inform crucial decision making.
“Strong collaboration and co-creation across our industry is critical to developing and scaling innovative solutions to complex challenges. We are excited to partner with the VU.CITY team to accelerate the development of this powerful platform and to bring our domain knowledge and digital expertise to support that journey.”
VU.CITY currently has modelled the city of London to 15cm accuracy, including 90% of the surrounding boroughs.
