How one Irish start-up is giving every home a hope value

We chat with Shane O’Donnell, CEO and Founder of Lanu, about how they’re making the home extension process easier, quicker and more transparent for everyone.

‘Leathnu’ — to extend

After studying City/Urban Planning in UCD, I wanted to tackle some of the big questions about society and the built environment. For more than seven years, I worked as a planning officer around many of London’s wealthiest and most densely populated boroughs. It soon became clear, I was mainly dealing with a lot of small householder problems and a lot of pain points.

These pain points come from all parties involved. From under-resourced planning departments, to poorly informed developers and frustrated home owners.

Lanu came from a desire to make the planning process easier, quicker and more transparent for everyone. About three years ago, I wrote down the rules of planning and transformed it into what we call ‘pseudo’ code, then an old friend from school, Dr Luke Coburn, turned this into actual code our patented algorithm, ‘Roofus’.

Two years ago, Lanu expanded and we were joined by two old school friends, Ron and Lorcan. Together we came up with the name Lanu from the Irish word ‘leathnu’- to extend. Starting from this Irish base, we’ve also recently added Marco, an Italian and a mathematician.

Ensuring homeowners have the same knowledge as planners

At Lanu, we want to make home extension process easier. Everyone knows planning permission applications are a slow and risky endeavour. We found the main issues for homeowners looking to extend are rules, speed and cost. A lot of people have a vague idea about Permitted Development Rights (PD), which is what you can add to your own home without getting planning permission from the council, but we want to ensure homeowners had all the resources possible to make an informed decision.

We want to democratise the process and let anyone using our service have the same knowledge as a planner, so they don’t take the wrong path and waste time and money on unrealistic extensions. By multiplying this solution out across a city, we also aim to find hidden potential that can help both the public and private house more people from their existing stock.

We can remotely produce easy to understand 3D models and plans of everything you can build under PD, as well as what’s likely to need planning permission.

Click here to get your house analysed by Lanu. LIBS members can use the code “LANUBETA” to get 50% off.

Techstars: an MBA, a coding festival and a secret brotherhood

An opportunity to build on what we had created came through Techstars. We had never heard of Techstars and barely knew what an accelerator was when we were introduced to Techstars London MD Eamonn Carey in January 2020.

Immediately Eamonn introduced us to many helpful people, he explained the ethos behind Techstars and what the program would entail. After several rounds of interviews and due diligence, we were offered a place on the program last September. It was only on our first day, after seeing the standard of the nine other companies, did we appreciate what we had achieved being selected from over 1,000 applicants.

Through Techstars, we met all sorts of geniuses, outliers and even companies who had been successfully trading for several years! The programme covered everything from accounting to company culture and it’s quite easily the best and most intense course/training/education/experience I’ve ever had.

We pivoted more times than I’d care to admit, but we were constantly learning and absorbing from the fantastic collection of mentors, associates and peers. We were definitely on the older end of the spectrum, but we held our own, bonded magnificently as a team, even with the COVID-19 enforced social distancing, and we just learned, learned and learned. It was like an MBA, a coding festival and a secret brotherhood rolled in to one.

COVID-19 and access to funding

Business-wise, our remote assessment is actually ideally suited to COVID-19 social distancing, but the pandemic has probably affected our ability to fundraise as it still seems very odd to be asking people for large sums of money over a fuzzy video call.

We’re currently fundraising with a mixture of VCs and angels and we’ve found angels with experience of the real estate world immediately understand and appreciate the problem Lanu are trying to solve.

World-wide investors

We also have some investors from Ireland, Australia and the US which we think will be very helpful when expanding. Australia, like Ireland and other former commonwealth countries, has a similar planning system to the UK. With some minor modifications to the code we can easily tailor a product for each territory.

Looking to the US, it’s different but simpler in many ways, and there’s a much bigger appetite and culture for a B2C home planning product there.

We also know planning and property development is something that can’t be solved or digitised by one single company, so we’re also collaborating with trailblazers such as Vu City, Offr and the most innovative councils in London.

In the long term, we see ‘digital twins’ for every home being the norm and Lanu as the gold standard in 3D extension possibilities and helping everyone envisage new housing possibilities.

Lanu uses sophisticated algorithms to calculate the planning possibilities of a house which can reveal the value within. To find out more about Lanu, visit their website here or email Shane at: shane@lanu.co.uk.

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