Founders: Liam Taylorwood-Roe, Connor Jones, James Baker
When you see thousands of pitches every year, there are times when you can get tempted to join the team itself. For James Baker it only took one pitch. He saw Liam and Connor pitch their previous startup Linuity and told them to scrap their product and work with him instead to solve a legacy problem in the construction industry. James had been working in the industry for more than a decade, becoming a subject matter expert in his own right. The construction industry is fraught with problems but perhaps the worst of them was how difficult and tedious planning and approvals were. For developers and architects, every plan required an outside expert consultant and approvals were often drawn-out and painfully slow. Assessing whether a site was viable was often a black box. No matter how many expert consultants you called upon, or how many overcomplicated rules you navigated, it was still unclear whether a project had legs or would sink by tomorrow. Months and substantial costs went in before anyone learned the application would be rejected, or that the site was never viable to begin with. After attempting to solve this issue through his own planning consultancy for two years, James still had the fire to find a better way to end planning headaches forever. When he met both Liam and Connor there was no way he would let this chance slip.
Liam Taylorwood-Roe and Connor Jones have been building various businesses for a few years. Both of them had an entrepreneurial spirit in their bones from watching their parents carve their own paths in business. Their greatest creation at the time was a startup called Linuity, an AI historian for architects, engineers and project managers. They transformed decades of project data into instant answers, allowing teams to access institutional knowledge that would otherwise take years to acquire. And they found relative success acquiring customers and building a strong pipeline. They were two technically gifted founders who saw a problem worth solving. But Liam and Connor felt something was missing. They had the tech, but builders didn’t trust two software founders who’d never worked a site. What they needed was a subject matter expert who could give the team an unfair advantage. Liam says it was just being in the "right place, right time" when they met James, someone who had the right experience and entrepreneurial desire.
Technology and construction historically haven’t met in the middle. Construction is a legacy industry where people leverage decades of experience to push projects forward, whilst also being hesitant to trust the entry of new technology. As James puts it, “it's often that these technology companies are never able to match the wavelength of the people they are trying to sell to.” Real builders with decades of experience, expertise and authority. From the tech landscape, perhaps the construction industry was too layered, low-trusting and frankly not as exciting as legal or finance B2B SaaS plays. Develpr, however, fits squarely between both. There is both the technology layer that was always needed and the domain expertise to build trust within the clients themselves.
Develpr now tackles this major problem with an end-to-end platform that delivers site feasibility assessments within 24 hours. A feasibility answer that used to take months now takes a day. A central hub to coordinate consultants, documents, and approval milestones in record time. Develpr's vision is to become the global source of truth for planning intelligence, structuring the world's most fragmented planning data so every council, developer, and consultant builds on top of their platform.
