London-based proptech startup Tract, which makes software to help identify land suitable for development, has raised funds from British VCs to advance its mission of addressing the country’s housing shortage. The investment round was led by Ada Ventures and Concept Ventures for an undisclosed amount. Ada Ventures partner Francesca (Check) Warner noted that the pre-seed round occurred in May 2024 in a recent Medium post explaining the rationale for the investment.
“The process of obtaining planning permissions is long, costly, and complex – half of planning applications are rejected because of mistakes or missing documents,” Warner argues. Tract’s sophisticated planning engine can make this process easier by identifying sites with favorable planning characteristics and determining the type of site that can be built and the documentation needed for the project.
“The software digitises and organises massive amounts of local planning data, measures planning risk by analysing past applications and forecasts likely outcomes,” Warner explains.
Founded by product engineer Jamie Rumbelow and data scientist Henry Dashwood, Tract aims to facilitate the building of 1 million homes in the next 10 years. The company is working on software that will help developers, land promoters, energy providers, and strategic land teams look for new sites. Tract currently offers a free appraisal for any site larger than half an acre in England, which includes a map of the site and a description of its planning constraints. The company, which is hiring for a fullstack engineer and frontend engineer, says it is making much of its code and data available open source.
Tract’s software has the potential to “unlock a completely unserved market of smaller land parcels,” according to Warner, by increasing the speed and certainty of planning applications – cutting down on the complexity and unpredictability that makes obtaining permissions for these diminutive sites a bad bet for developers. The company’s solutions could also free up sites owned by large institutional landowners for productive use. Obtaining planning permissions boosts the value of agricultural land, Warner notes.
Britain has a shortage of 4.3 million homes compared to the average European country, a gap that would take at least half a century to fill even if the government’s target of 300,000 new homes per year is achieved, according to the Centre for Cities. The average house costs more than 10 times the average salary across England and vacancy rates are below 1%.
Tract believes there are some 200,000 sites in the UK that are suitable for building and could benefit from its software.