Neuron Case Study | Farr Street, Marrickville
February 14, 2023Neuron Case Study | South Yarra House
August 9, 2023Neuron Case Study | Farr Street, Marrickville
February 14, 2023Neuron Case Study | South Yarra House
August 9, 2023
We are thrilled to announce that Neuron have been awarded the Federal Governments Accelerating Commercialisation grant!
This $800,000 project, which is 50% funded by the program, has allowed us to expand our R&D team and fast-track bringing new projects to market. The Neuron 2.0 project is set to be a significant leap forward in SaaS capabilities, enabling us to tackle more complex building types, starting with commercial towers. We are excited about the possibilities that lie ahead and the impact our technology can have in this space.
We owe a huge thank you to our grant facilitators at i4 Connect for their assistance throughout the process. We remain committed to growing, innovating, and providing exceptional support to our clients with the help of this grant.
See below extracts from the article published by our Grant facilitator i4 Connect with regards to our application which includes their assessment of Neuron and the tech-based consulting space in which we operate.
Neuron: Engineering better buildings
“Nobody had figured out how to rapidly scale highly accurate engineering advice before,” says Steve Cassells, Neuron Director. “We wanted to build a scenario-based solving engine that could crunch huge amounts of engineering logic to put project-specific tier-one engineering advice in the hands of our entire industry. We realised that was the trick to driving better building designs. Architects and Developers need project-specific space and cost data, risks and engineering requirements at the very start of the project to understand and unlock the full potential of a new development. Our data and advice ultimately enable more informed decision-making, faster, at the most critical stage of new projects.”
The Neuron team have many of the qualities that make a strong application for the Accelerating Commercialisation grant.
Humble and curious team
The Neuron team are great to work with. The team are experts in their field while remaining humble and curious about the problem. First, they tested the market with an MVP for residential developments. After customer validation, the team found the bigger opportunity was in the $5.2b annual market for engineering software, which is growing over 15% per year.
Steve Cassells, Neuron Director, said: “The ah-ha moment was that data can be systemised and made available in a cloud-based platform where customers have the information they need, when they need it.”
The team is happy to learn and ask for advice. Following early feedback on the business plan, Steve took a few weeks to get extra market validation and governance arrangements in place. These traits are a strong signal the team has the focus and drive to build a product of real value.
Truly novel software built over fifty thousand hours
The Neuron team is building their engineering software from scratch. The current challenges of complex developments faced by architects and engineering companies are time and cost restraints. Human error compounds this issue, wherein multiple siloed consultants must work overtime to correct an error, only to find that the chosen solution created other issues elsewhere. This can send even the most promising development into an unforeseen time and cost spiral.
Frustrated with the status quo, Neuron has spent years and over fifty thousand hours manually collecting hundreds of thousands of engineering data points to re-build industry-standard engineering logic in a cloud based parametric format to create their real-time engineering platform.
Neuron understand the importance of the certainty their software provides. Even on a large complex project, such a $400m development with site-specific restraints, they can help to make major design decisions in the first couple of days, without errors or wasted time.
Strong customer support
Neuron’s novelty creates a value proposition that is supported by credible industry partners, including the country’s largest engineering and architecture companies. After applying the software to over 100 projects, it has become evident that this tool is faster, cheaper and better than anything available in the market globally.
For Investa, a real estate investment manager and developer working with Neuron, the software has the potential to de-risk large complex projects quickly and enable robust decision making, while squeezing out more value out of a development at critical points in the design phase.
A compelling value proposition means Neuron’s technology has strong support down the value chain. The team spent years refining the prototype, with input from industry experts, developers, builders, contractors, authorities, Government procurement, and suppliers such as Rheem, Carrier, and prop tech collaborators.
For Fitzpatrick & Partners, an architectural company, the software will enable their designers to unlock more time to create better designs.
With strong industry support from across the spectrum, Neuron’s product and services have multiple paths to expansion both through direct engagement, sales and API integrations.
For all these reasons, I am not surprised Neuron’s Accelerating Commercialisation application was successful.