Karin Brandt
Title: CEO, coUrbanize
Age: 29
Experience: 2 1/2 years
Karin Brandt is CEO and co-founder of coUrbanize, a Cambridge startup that uses technology to stimulate public input on development projects. coUrbanize’s software enables communities and developers to set up online forums with information on proposed projects, including documents and map-based visualizations of impacts such as traffic and shadows. The company’s first client was the city of Boston, which hired coUrbanize to set up online forums suggesting new locations for Hubway bike rental stations. Since then, it’s added clients including Boston Properties, Leggat McCall and Boston Children’s Hospital.
Q: Where did the idea for coUrbanize come from?
A: I went to MIT for city planning. I thought city planning was super innovative. Then I started going to a bunch of public meetings at city hall and I saw there was a really big problem there. Conversations are extremely emotional, nobody shows up, nobody can talk about traffic and shadows because it’s so complex and opaque. So what we wanted to do is bring more people to the table to understand what’s really happening with a project and make the facts easier to understand.
Q: What was it like participating in Techstars 2013?
A: Techstars was an amazing experience. It’s three months. In a lot of ways it was more intense than MIT. We met with about 80 mentors, people who have started successful companies who are investors. You pitch them your business, they ask you a bunch of questions and give you advice and recommendations about who to connect with to grow the business faster.
Q: What were some of the toughest questions?
A: (Laughs) I think a lot of people don’t know about real estate in the tech world, don’t know how much money is at stake for a real estate project and how many there are. Sometimes real estate just happens in the background of our everyday life. That was a challenge. One thing I oftentimes had to explain to people is that projects don’t happen until there is a public approval at these meetings. A lot of people had never been to meetings or didn’t know about how this process worked.
Q: Who was your first client?
A: We founded the company in February of 2013 and we launched in May 2013. That was a very busy and stressful period. We were talking with people in the mayor’s office in Boston about real estate and they said, “Actually, we’d like to launch in three weeks with the Hubway program.” That was a lot of fun because they really needed to reach bikers, who are not a population who are going to show up at a lot of in-person meetings.
Q: What’s your newest project?
A: We just launched this week a project with the city of Cambridge for their master planning process, Cambridge Conversations. We run it as a software platform. We set the project managers up and they have control of the content, the images, the data and responding to comments.
Q: Who gets to see the data you collect through the sites?
A: There’s certain types of data only the project developer can see. For example, we give them an idea of the location of users so they can understand whether people in Texas or New York or Cambridge are commenting. And we also run sentiment analytics on all the comments so they can see the level of positivity or negativity, which is really helpful for our real estate customers as they go through iterations of their plans. Our first real estate client is Boston Properties. We’re working with them on the Ames Street residential project.
Q: Do you moderate comments?
A: We have community guidelines. We require people to use real names. This is not the Boston Globe comment section or anything like that. We have software that detects profanity. Anyone can flag a comment if they think it’s not following the community guidelines.
Q: You received $580,000 in funding from an angel investor last fall. Are you in the market for additional funding?
A: We’re not raising any money right now. Our customers are developers. Our target market is real estate development. This is where we think we can make the biggest impact, helping developers iterate before they get to the meeting so they know what the concerns are and can address them more quickly. It’s a software as a service-based model.
Q: Are you looking at markets outside Boston?
A:Definitely. I lived in Philly before coming to Boston. Really loved the city and it’s going through a lot of interesting changes. Obviously New York is close and some of our customers also do work there. Chicago is also on the list. I’m from the Midwest and really fond of Chicago and what’s happening there.
Top Five Boston-Area Summer Spots:
- Walden Pond
- Esplanade
- Public Garden
- Harbor Islands
- Revere Beach
