This is interesting and they make some good observations but I can't help but think the deck was stacked against them because they are trying to come up with a technical/business solution to what is fundamentally a political problem.
Yeah "founded to build software to fix Britain’s housing crisis."
There was literally zero hope for success.
I know of an ISP that wrote a custom CRM/ERP solution in order to harass the less well behaved telecom company in town into doing their jobs when they said they would do them. So it would do things like send you a reminder to see if the approval or the hookup they promised you Wednesday was done so you could meet you customer’s expectation of having their Internet turned on by Friday.
That’s probably the best you can do. Make it obvious to everyone including the bureaucracy what their externalities are doing, and either nudge them to go faster or divest some responsibilities to someone else.
Planning permission is partly a political issue, partly down to expertise. You need experience, you need to know the rules, you need to know the tricks, you need to know how to draft the application. You need to know the game. Indeed this is not something that is waiting for a technical solution.
It's great that they tried, though. But it strikes me that they seem to be 20 something students (not meant disparagingly) with no experience in this so perhaps lacked the insights and understanding of the pain points. It does seem that VCs were happy to fund based on an AI play, though ;)
My ex worked at a government contractor and they started paying the guy who wrote grant proposals more than the CEO because without grants they were fucked, and the grant writer was getting wistful for other horizons.
Talking to government is a highly compensated skill set. That’s all lobbyists are.
Bingo, and most engineers have zero clue or respect for this skillset. Even traditional PMs / business dev types don't know what they don't know about how to talk with government or government-adjacent businesses. I've worked for at least 3 companies who had high hopes for building on state/municipal/higher-ed revenue and talked it up in their internal meetings, but when you would ask the CEO/CFO where their government affairs team was, they would look at you like you were speaking Latin. They basically just planned to take their consumer sales motion and apply it to these areas, which fails hilariously almost every time.
That is a lot of what to know.
I don't doubt that at least as important is who you know, and especially how well they know you.
They say that in the article where they talk about social technology and the importance of drinking in pubs.
The deck was stacked against them because nobody understood why the conversion process was so expensive or even there in the first place. It would have been easier to identify the handful of organizations that'd benefit from labeling this a political problem and embed themselves as vendors.
Their business model made sense for America, where sprawl is embraced.