Giraffe Partners With Developers to Build Better Cities

Disruptive technology that provides savvy developers with collaboration tools are set to become the “new normal” post-coronavirus.

“Like it or not, the digital revolution is coming for property. It's startling how much inefficiency there is in the built environment as a whole,” Giraffe chief executive Rob Asher said.

Asher co-founded Sydney-based company Giraffe, a holistic 3D platform that knits together previously siloed and disconnected systems.

Giraffe launched at the end of February, just prior to the disbanding of physical workplaces due to the coronavirus pandemic.

“It was always the intention for Giraffe to provide a solution for teams to collaborate from multiple locations,” Giraffe co-founder Lucy Booth said.

Booth and Asher, previously of Cox Architecture, and engineer John Asher developed Giraffe to allow developers and consultants to collaborate and work on a single design and financial model simultaneously.

A developer can scratch out an initial concept in minutes and instantly see rough metrics like FSR, yield, and approximate build cost.

The simple data model can then be shared through the platform with other consultants and stakeholders for further review and iterations.

“It's like the back of the napkin on steroids,” Giraffe chief technology office John Asher said.

“We have the benefit of having worked with and on some of the largest development projects in the southern hemisphere.”

Giraffe is now enabling development teams both locally & overseas in the USA, Japan and UK.

Their customers projects range from developing QSR drive-thru restaurants across the Southern USA, to massive urban planning projects at city and state scale.

“We’ve spoken with hundreds of developers both in Australia and abroad and we’ve grown confident of one core belief.

“Property will not be disrupted by the tech giants or the latest machine learning algorithms; it will be disrupted by those who can accelerate their creativity, relationships and political nous with digital tools.”

These age-old developer “soft skills” are more vital than ever in maintaining differentiation in a dislocated property market, Asher says.

In the last month we've seen the collapse of Google sidewalk labs and the near simultaneous announcement of Lendlease digital twin consortium and consequent platform to better collaborate with their already vertically integrated teams.

“At Giraffe, we're building a platform to help property developers of any scale,” Booth said.

“We give them tools to turn their relationships into frictionless digital teams. Our software helps them achieve the efficiencies and speed of vertically integrated multinationals.’

“Ultimately, our goal is to mobilise the full spectrum of built environment and design professionals to create more liveable and equitable cities.

“That’s our driving force and inspires each of our decisions.

“We are a tech company that believes that cities are made for humans to live in, and human input into their development and design is the most important thing.”

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