From the corner of Laura and Ashley streets to the world — that is the plan for local data company Urban SDK.
A recent closing of a seed funding round will help the Jacksonville-based company’s goal to grow nationwide. Urban SDK raised $4.5 million from a collection of private investors, strategic investors and venture capital funds.
“The whole idea is to take what we have built so far and expand nationwide,” co-CEO and founder Drew Messer said of a company that found its footing through a relationship with the UNF Center for Entrepreneurship and Innovation. “…We got our start in October 2018 and we’re trying to keep up with a pretty healthy growth rate, so we become a dominant player in this space across the country.”
This year, the company plans a Series A funding round. Doing so would allow Urban SDK to expand its international presence.
Data collection is one part of Urban SDK’s formula. It collates, synthesizes and analyzes data for communities or governmental agencies with the expectation the latter uses evidence, not anecdotes, in crafting public policy.
Urban SDK operates in 10 states and last fall, won a bid in Thunder Bay, Ontario, Canada – its first partnership outside the United States. In its work with the city on the northwestern shore of Lake Superior and engineering company T.Y. Lin International, Urban SDK aggregates data from location-enabled devices in order to understand movement patters during a particular timeframe.
“They wanted to know when were the patters of movement to and from the area so they could show parking needs, expected number of visitors and (more),” said Justin Dennis, Urban SDK’s co-founder and chief technology officer. “We’re optimizing use of location data. …We engineer that into a format that is usable by cities, real estate development companies and civil and urban planners so they have a real-time understanding of how people are moving, when and where (they are moving) throughout a city.”
Dennis added the transportation modeling the company produces allows policy makers and urban planners to make strategic decisions in the prioritization of public funds and resources. Those possibilities, Dennis and Messer believe, will expand as the company grows.
