In Singapore, we spend most of our lives in buildings. When outdoors, we navigate through our cityscape, and the sights and sounds of our neighbourhoods with ease. But behind executing a well-thought-out urban and building design lie inefficiencies and fragmented workflows that often lead to construction delays and disputes. Deep-tech start-up Urbanflow.co aims to streamline the traditionally gruelling design process behind sustainable buildings and cities, making it more seamless and efficient.
As Singapore races to green 80% of its buildings by 2030 under its ambitious Green Building Masterplan, the challenge is not just in meeting the target — it’s about transforming how buildings in our city-state are designed, built, and operated sustainably. As new buildings get smarter and greener, integrating sustainability and optimising operational performance have become even more important considerations when in the initial stage of building design.
Having encountered inefficiencies in urban and building design, and the building delivery process, Yu Qian Ang, Bryan Ong and Ryan Tan decided to come together to develop Urbanflow, a collaborative, AI-driven urban and building design platform that empowers architects and planners to meet these bold green building goals with unprecedented speed and precision.
Urbanflow’s Co-founder Yu Qian shares, “All of us have an affiliation to the built environment of sorts. I did my PhD in Building Technology, Ryan built the Singapore Carbon Calculator, and Bryan is at GovTech Open Government Products working on tech for public good. It made sense for us to come together and develop a platform that can help make designing sustainable buildings and cities more seamless and efficient.”
Urbanflow is backed by NUS GRIP (Graduate Research Innovation Programme), and is also in the Microsoft for Startups and Nvidia Inception Program. The platform is not yet available to the public , but interested parties can join the waitlist.
Breaking down the silos
The AEC industry suffers from fragmented workflows where design teams work in silos using disconnected tools, making it difficult to integrate sustainability considerations, collaboration, and performance analysis from the earliest stages of projects, leading to costly changes, missed targets, and suboptimal building outcomes.
Urbanflow is designed with the primary objective of breaking down silos between architects, engineers, planners, and developers by providing a unified platform for real-time design collaboration and energy analysis – all powered by AI.
How Urbanflow works
“Urbanflow is like having a team of AI building experts working together in real-time to optimise your designs. Instead of running time-consuming simulations, we have trained specialised AI "surrogate models" - each an expert in different building performance areas like energy consumption, cost estimating, carbon accounting etc,” Yuqian explains.
When a team member creates or modifies a building design, the AI models instantly analyse it simultaneously, drawing from thousands of pre-computed simulations they learnt in training.
He adds, “The models can synchronize in real-time - for example, when the energy AI suggests better window placement, the daylight AI immediately shows how that affects natural lighting while the airflow AI updates ventilation predictions.
This collaborative network of specialised AIs gives you instant, scientifically backed feedback on multiple performance aspects as you design, transforming what used to take hours of separate simulations into seconds of integrated analysis, enabling you to create better, more sustainable buildings faster.”
Changing how Singapore’s construction industry had worked – for decades
That Urbanflow focuses on early-stage collaborative design optimisation, rather than detailed post-design analysis is a game-changer. This enables designers to take the latest construction and green building regulations into better consideration and addresses the industry’s most pressing need: making sustainability decisions when they have maximum impact and minimum cost.
“Our AI models are built on peer-reviewed algorithms and validated simulation methods developed through NUS research to ensure scientific accuracy. This combination of academic rigor, real-time collaborative capabilities, and early-stage focus creates a unique value proposition that Urbanflow has, changing the way the industry works, fundamentally. We want to transform how teams approach sustainable design from the very first sketch, rather than treating performance analysis as an afterthought.”
From academics to industry practitioners
Already Urbanflow is seeing results. “Our research group, City Syntax Lab that spun off Urbanflow works with planning and built environment agencies and comanies across Singapore. NVIDIA also supported us with their top-tier GPUs, which helped us building our models, contributing to us setting up Urbanflow.”
Urbanflow is designed for architecture and design firms working on commercial, institutional, and multi-family residential projects, particularly those committed to sustainable design and green building certifications. “We also serve engineering consultancies, building performance specialists, property developers focused on ESG goals, urban planning agencies working on district-level sustainability initiatives, and educational institutions teaching sustainable design.”
To effectively utilise Urbanflow, businesses should be engaged in projects beyond single-family residential scale, be comfortable with cloud-based collaborative platforms, and committed to sustainability outcomes or green building goals. “Though, Urbanflow is expanding to include the residential market too,” Yuqian was quick to add.
Navigating NUS start-up ecosystem
NUS provides world-class programmes and funding opportunities that match the calibre of elite US institutions such as MIT and Harvard, where Yu Qian was once based. “The challenge lies in navigating the substantial red tape, paperwork, and bureaucracy — which can be ten times more complex than at institutions like MIT or Harvard. And thus, the challenge lies in navigating substantially more administrative complexity and bureaucratic layers.”
He notes that for software companies like Urbanflow, the personnel costs should be the primary expense, with minimal overhead elsewhere.
“Our challenge isn't rising business costs – it's navigating the administrative burden and paperwork. Just to start the company, I needed approvals from the whole world and had to complete over 10 different forms. Some days, I spend most of my time on administrative tasks and filling out endless forms instead of actually conducting research or building the company.
Looking ahead: is AI really delivering on its promise?
Yu Qian offers a candid perspective: “While AI is undoubtedly transformative for urban design and sustainability, I believe it's overhyped right now, and many VCs will likely not see the returns they're expecting. The key is looking beyond the buzzwords and focusing on metrics that actually matter - whether the technology delivers genuine positive value and ROI for users (we are working on that too).
In Yu Qian’s view, AI’s true potential in this field lies in addressing specific, measurable challenges, such as accelerating design iterations, improving building performance predictions, or optimising resource allocation. “It’s about solving real problems, not just implementing AI for its own sake,” he emphasised.
He adds that the global start-up and venture world moves very quickly and wait for no one. “If there's something you need to do, just get it done and worry about other things later. As long as it does not violate moral, ethical, legal, or regulatory boundaries, of course.”
