Urban Intelligence onboards new customers 20x faster with Radency’s embedded team
United Kingdom
Urban Planning
20X faster
New customer setup reduced from 40 to < 2 hours
Embedded AI team
2 Full-stack Engineers,
2025-now
Ongoing partnership
1 Delivery Partner
Business context
Urban Intelligence builds PlaceMaker, software used by UK councils to create sustainable communities.
They needed it multi-tenant: one codebase, more councils, no engineering overhead.
Sceptical about outsourcing, they still took the bet, and chose Radency.
Solution overview
Four years later, they continue working with our certified full-stack engineers, further improving PlaceMaker.
“We were originally a bit sceptical about outsourcing our technology functions, but I'm delighted to say that deciding to go with Radency has taken away a key area of stress in my life!”
— Daniel Mohamed, Founder & CEO @ Urban Intelligence
Hiring engineers?
Daniel and Paul knew how stressful it is
For Daniel Mohamed, software development was the most expensive and stressful part of running his PropTech startup, Urban Intelligence.
Onboarding a new council took a full week: one developer had to clone and customize the entire codebase each time.
Scaling to 10–20 clients this way would waste too much time and money. Daniel and his CTO Paul wanted a multi-tenant platform instead.
Outsourcing felt risky, but the only option. They found Radency. We got to work.
Talent shortage
Competing with big tech salaries made in-house hires impossible
Freelancer issues
Freelancers slowed things down with rework and proved unreliable
Team attrition
Their lead developer was eventually poached by another firm
“We reviewed several potential vendors. It was clear that Radency had the experience and availability we needed.”
— Paul Nebel Meng, CTO @ Urban Intelligence
Core team of 3
fully embedded with Urban Intelligence
We kicked off with a Delivery Partner and two Full-Stack Engineers from Radency. Four years later, Urban Intelligence continues working with us. Here’s how it began.
1 →
First call, work started in 2 weeks
Urban Intelligence reached out for an estimate and spoke directly with Radency’s Delivery Partner, Bogdan, who hand-picked engineers for this project.
2 →
Two full-stack engineers on board
Two certified full-stack developers joined. Within the first two weeks, they delivered the base structure for a multi-tenant system and fixed priority bugs.
3 →
Multi-tenant platform foundation in 6 months
Over the first six months, the team laid the foundation for Urban Intelligence’s unified, multi-tenant platform, replacing the fragile cloned-code setup.
4 →
Scaled to 4 engineers
“So happy with how Radency performed”, Daniel and Paul added two more engineers. At one point, they also asked to bring in extra engineer for just 1.5 months.
5 →
Still embedded, 4 years on
Today, 2 Radency engineers continue improving PlaceMaker. Both are from our certification program. One has been with the project since the start.
Results so far:
20x faster engineering setup
Time to get a new council running on PlaceMaker dropped from 40+ engineer hours to ~2 hours, thanks to multi-tenant configuration and automated CI/CD.
Zero missed deadlines
Since Radency joined, every delivery has shipped on time, even under pressure. Urban Intelligence’s own clients praised the team for their “rapid and responsive manner.”
25+ councils operational on PlaceMaker
The unified multi-tenant architecture let Urban Intelligence grow from 3–4 councils to 25+ without codebase clones or week-long engineering setup — a 5–7× jump in capacity.
1 “key area of stress” removed
CEO Daniel says working with Radency lifted a major source of stress from his role, while CTO Paul was confident enough to bring two more engineers on board.
“We reviewed several potential vendors. It was clear that Radency had the experience and availability we needed.”
— Paul Nebel Meng, CTO @ Urban Intelligence
PlaceMaker
now a multi-tenant platform used by 25+ UK councils
Each tenant (council) has access to the platform but with their own URL, branding, and configuration. Data is fully isolated per tenant to prevent leaks, with GDPR compliance and encrypted traffic between backend and frontend.
Key features shipped with Radency’s engineers:
01
FEATURE
Call for Sites
A public portal where councils collect and assess land proposals from developers, landowners, and residents. Submissions are mapped, validated, and stored automatically, cutting weeks of manual form entry and GIS work.
02
FEATURE
SAML / SSO
Beyond email/password, councils can log in using 3-rd party vendors with the help of SSO like Azure. This integration matches council IT policies and makes PlaceMaker easier to roll out at scale.
03
FEATURE
Green/blue deployment
Releases now run at ~99% uptime. Before, updates meant maintenance downtime. With blue/green deployment, new versions run in parallel, traffic switches instantly, and rollbacks take seconds.
04
FEATURE
Feature flags
Specific functionality can be toggled on/off per tenant. Councils get only the modules they need without forks in the codebase.
05
FEATURE
Version-based configurations
Admins can create and re-use versioned templates for dashboards, questionnaires, and map-based reports. Saves time when rolling out similar workflows across different councils.
06
FEATURE
Story Maps
Admins combine text, maps, and media into interactive dashboards. Councils use these to run public consultations and collect feedback on planned development.
Solution architecture:
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Technologies used
→ Frontend
React
TypeScript
→ Backend
NodeJS
Nest Knex
→ Cloud
Google Cloud Platform
Docker
Firebase
→ 3rd-party integrations
OpenLayers
Matomo
Sequelize
PostgreSQL
Sentry
“Not only have we managed to meet client expectations, but clients have thanked us for the rapid and responsive manner in which we have produced their solutions. This is largely due to the competency and work ethic of the Radency team.”
— Paul Nebel Meng, CTO @ Urban Intelligence
Urban Intelligence took the bet. It paid off
Sceptical at first. Working with Radency’s certified engineers 4+ years later. Today, two remain embedded at Urban Intelligence. The company has also hired in-house, and one of our engineers now leads their expanded team.
2021
Sceptical about outsourcing
Cloning codebase for each client → ~1 week of engineer time to set up a new council
Fragile setup, bugs duplicated across instances, weak security
3–4 councils supported
Constant hiring stress: freelancers, poached devs, failed in-house attempts
2025
Working with Radency certified engineers 4+ years
Multi-tenant architecture → new council live in ~2 hours of engineer time
Blue/green deployment, CI/CD, and feature flags → stable, scalable, ~99% uptime
25+ councils supported → 5–7× capacity jump
Founders freed from hiring stress, with an embedded Radency team in place