Globally, numerous cities today face a growing set of environmental and infrastructural challenges.
Pollution levels continue to rise, climate change brings unpredictable weather patterns, and ageing infrastructure struggles to keep up with increasing demand.
Rapid urbanisation further amplifies these issues, leading to severe traffic congestion, housing shortages, and strained public services.
Without effective planning tools, cities risk inefficiencies that impact both residents’ quality of life and long-term sustainability.
Meet Scenexus: A new spin-off from TNO
Say hello to Scenexus, a new TNO spin-off company specialising in enterprise software for urban planning.
Based out of The Hague, Scenexus offers a SaaS solution that helps cities and urban planners gain quick and accurate insights into important urban challenges and developments.
By creating digital twins of cities or regions, decision-makers, planners, and engineers can easily assess the impact of their ideas in just minutes.
To know more about the company’s vision, mission, and challenges, we at Silicon Canals, interviewed Jeroen Borst, co-founder and CEO of Scenexus, as a part of our “New kid on the block” series.
Here’s what he has to say!
The origin story
Jeroen Borst, who studied Environmental Physics, started working at TNO in 1998. There, he used GIS technology to model noise and air pollution in cities.
His work led to the creation of a traditional GIS system, which later became the foundation for Urban Strategy.
While working with different cities, Borst noticed a strong need for interactive and integral results. Cities wanted quick insights into how land use changes would affect accessibility, the environment, and health, instead of waiting for reports.
This realisation motivated him to create a comprehensive and interactive planning tool.
In 2005, the development of Urban Strategy picked up when Walter Lohman, now the CTO of Scenexus, joined the team.
As Bart Vuijk ( now CCO) and Peter van Oorschot (now VP of North America) joined the team to make the connection to cities in the Netherlands, Europe, and the US, Urban Strategy’s reach grew.
To scale Urban Strategy further, Scenexus was founded in 2024. With a team of 9 professionals, located in the USA and the Netherlands, they support cities with Urban Strategy.
The mission: Sustainable urban planning
The company is on a mission to improve the quality of urban living sustainably by leveraging the power of digital twins.
“We believe that powerful cities are crucial to secure a liveable future for everyone. To plan the future development of cities is a huge challenge, because housing, transportation, climate adaptation, and energy supply all compete for the same square meter. Decisions on how the scarce space in cities is used are affecting sustainability and quality of life of current and future residents,” explains Borst.
The company aims to simplify the complexity with its Urban Strategy, an interactive tool for comprehensive city planning—similar to “SimCity for professionals.”
What does Scenexus do?
The company develops Urban Strategy, providing a decision support system for spatial planning instruments for cities and regions.
“We help cities to get started by setting up a validated digital twin using (preferably) existing data. We make this Digital Twin available and train the end users to let them work independently,” adds Borst.
By creating digital twins of a city or region by combining multiple rich data sets on Scenexus’ software platform, planners, and engineers can assess the exact impact of ideas and alterations.
This enables cities to address urgent challenges, such as the housing crisis, congestion, and environmental issues.
“Urban Strategy integrates very fast simulations, covering many domains, to create an interactive and holistic predictive digital twin,” adds Borst.
The power behind Urban Strategy
At the heart of Scenexus’ Urban Strategy platform are powerful algorithms running on graphical processing units (GPUs).
The GPU implementation enables Scenexus to process thousands of calculations in parallel, achieving results up to 1,000 times faster than the leading planning software on the market.
This enables Scenexus clients to complete more projects each year by minimising the time required to plan and develop effective urban concepts.
“Feedback we got from the city of Amsterdam is that they saved money because they started working with Urban Strategy. Not only the efficiency in the decision-making process, but also avoided cost due to smarter infrastructure maintenance planning,” adds Borst.
Striking Balancing: Accuracy, usability, and data integration
According to the company, urban strategy is multi-faceted and multidimensional. It allows users to view the impact of developments on various factors such as traffic, livability, resident sentiment, financial growth, safety, greenhouse gas emissions, and well-being.
Discussing the challenge of balancing a wide range of data sources while ensuring both accuracy and usability, Borst states, “The platform is set up modularly, allowing parallel processing of multiple domains. The interaction between the modules is covered by our integration platform. Therefore, data sources can be calibrated and validated per domain.”
“We are optimising the usability by providing an intuitive web interface. We differentiate different levels of users. The first level of users can evaluate many policies after a simple instruction. After a training session, more advanced users can build more complex scenarios and add their data to the system. High-end users, such as the city of Amsterdam, can use the Urban Strategy API to develop or connect to their analytics tools,” he adds.
Challenges: Overcoming silos in urban planning
Urban planning is complex, involving multiple domains that are often managed separately in silos, states Borst.
“Every silo, e.g. transportation, has developed its workflow, procedures, and instruments. This makes it very difficult to get a holistic view of what is happening in the city, let alone the insight into future scenarios,” adds Borst.
The company’s urban strategy breaks down these silos, enabling cities to collaborate easily.
It provides a common language for integrated decision-making and smarter urban planning.
Expansion plans
Cities such as Amsterdam, San Diego, Singapore, and Breda use this technology to address challenges related to housing, congestion, and the environment.
Currently, the company is also focusing on Europe and the US, confirms Borst.
“The first step is to develop lighthouse projects with front-running cities (big and small). These early adopters help us understand the city’s needs, and in return, these cities have a large influence on the Urban Strategy development roadmap. At the same time, we are setting up partnerships with consultants that can scale beyond our reach,” adds Borst when asked about the strategy for scaling Scenexus globally.
Future of urban planning
Urban planning is set to undergo a major transformation in the next decade as the demand for faster, more informed decision-making grows.
“We envision that urban planning will radically change in the coming years because the need for better and faster decisions will only become bigger and adoption of instruments such as Urban Strategy will become the standard,” adds Borst.
The next step, according to Borst, is to go from interactive scenario testing, ‘SimCity for professionals’ to AI-supported optimisation ‘Co-pilot for Urban Planning’.
“AI will not replace deterministic models because explainability is crucial in the public domain. However, AI can be very helpful to translate a challenge ‘what is the best place to develop 50,000 houses in my city?’ into a goal function, weighing all aspects and taking all relevant legislation into account,” he adds.
Partnerships
According to Borst, the development of generative AI will boost the use of fast simulations to the next level. The integration of increased computing power alongside AI training is an important aspect of the company’s strategic roadmap.
“We are excited about our partnerships with NVIDIA, cloud providers such as Microsoft, and universities such as the University of California San Diego and San Diego State University because they provide us with the power to serve our current customers and develop the technology for the future,” he concludes.
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