Let's plan a balanced future together!

How it all started

Our common journey started in research at the TUM, more specifically at the Chair of Urban Structure and Transport Planning. Our enthusiasm about the development of GOAT has never stopped and we are especially curious about the ability to help changing the way cities are built. By the power of the accessibility concept, digital mapping technologies and tons of spatial data.

The hard and intensive work on building GOAT culminated in a useful accessibility instrument, which will facilitate planners and decision makers to plan more effective for walking and cycling.

We are absolute convinced that new directions of work are necessary for continuous development and the application in practice to build more sustainable and balanced cities and regions worldwide. Therefore, we founded our start-up and chose a self-explaining name for it: Plan4Better!

Our core team consists of Elias Pajares, Ulrike Jehle and Majk Shkurti and our core expertise lies in the fields of environmental engineering, urban and transport planning, GIS expertise and software development. We are located at the TUM Venture Lab Built Environment with the perfect environment to build our company.

Our Motivation

What was our motivation to found a start-up? It is rooted in our missions: first, as already mentioned, we want to contribute to sustainable mobility. The second is our commitment to contribute to open data as well as to open source. Third, we want to bring innovation to practice and in practical terms, we want to support municipalities in the planning process by crafting and providing map-based digital tools to build a balanced future at the municipal level.

We summarize cutting-edge analyses in an enjoyable and easy-to-use interface. All in all, we pursue the vision, that Plan4Better becomes the hidden champion to design sustainable and attractive spaces. We already had the opportunity to use GOAT together with numerous practitioners from various municipalities/consultancies and we received an overall overwhelming feedback! GOAT is urgently needed, as the industry is lacking digital planning tools which are mature, dynamic and affordable to shape active mobility. This motivated us to go all in!

Our Offer

Our business model includes distributing GOAT as a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) by providing individualized versions of GOAT as custom versions worldwide. In addition, we will subsequently set-up GOAT on a larger spatial scale, starting with regions in Germany, and offer easy access by a subscription model. We are aiming to extend this gradually to several countries in Europe.

Our portfolio incorporates also additional services linked to data management and supply as well as WebGIS development and consulting. In addition, we will provide professional training on the use of GOAT and novel data collection methods (OSM, Mapillary) for our customers. Accordingly, in our B2B business model we are primarily focusing on offering our service to municipalities, planning agencies, real-estate developers and location planners.

Together towards a better future

Our start-up adventure just started, and we are very excited about the new drive our activities are getting. Despite that, we will of course stay committed to our core values, such as open-source development, and to our network. Therefore, we are very much looking forward to advance together with our friends and partners to plan a better world in the future.