News

1- Can you briefly explain what your solution is all about? What’s unique about it?

We offer the first search engine for liveable places and by doing so, we make the home search for the first time a totally personal experience.

2- What’s the story behind your company? How was the idea for this business born?

We are from Vienna in Austria which this year was repeatedly named the most liveable city on earth. Some years ago I was telling a former fellow student of mine about the idea of individually defining the most liveable places down to the point. He was reflecting on it and finally found the time to build the software for this. Our ex-professor became the mentor and when we gathered for the presentation we all were delighted about the tool he had built. Having a comeback with this project at university was a great privilege and on this occasion, a talented young colleague joined the team. He was creating the algorithms to do the location scoring.

3-Which is the challenge that your solution tackles, and how do you set apart from the other companies with similar solutions?

Making serial location checks with maps for finding the next home is challenging. Soon it gets misleading and specific location reports are confusing on the other hand. Having found the next home together with the right location when you need one doesn´t happen too often. At PlaceQu® we put the user in the middle to choose his/her/their own preferences concerning the wanted place. Isn´t it the case that someone wants to live in a `greener´ and someone else in a ´more vivid´ environment? With our technology, we feature real matching for a new age in the property business.

4- What are your goals, and what’s the biggest challenge you are trying to overcome at this moment?

We need to scale in the long run and we need to cross national borders. For this reason, we highly depend on data that isn´t just available in one area. Data that is gathered from satellites are serving here. Types of land cover from the last question make a difference for our kind of service and make us stand out from the rest. Having that kind of data we may not only scale better but also better meet new use cases like city development and soil preserving planning methods. For taking up those future issues we participate in the Copernicus Masters Challenge by ESA again, where we could achieve a second national prize last year.

5- What advice would you give to an entrepreneur trying to pave his/her way in the space sector landscape?

Work your way through your own use cases and do not let yourself be blinded by space technology.

6- About SUN, why did you apply?

For us, it was a great help being part of SUN in order to work forward-oriented and bring innovative solutions down to the ground. Disrupting for the better is only possible with strong backup from people and organizations with a wide perspective. Literally, no one can have a wider one than someone looking on earth from space. This all together is why we are next going to apply for ESA Business Incubation (BIC).