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.