urban-infrastructure
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Intersection’s pitch: let the ads pay for the city
The company behind LinkNYC advertising turns sidewalks, stations and bike docks into media. Its history shows both the appeal and the hard limits of getting brands to fund public conveniences.
The Garbage Trucks That Went to War With Urban Blight
A University of Alabama economics experiment strapped cameras to trash trucks to map urban decay. Five years and $15 million later, City Detect is doing the work of 40 code officers with one vehicle - and cities are starting to fix blight before it spreads.
The Bus Shelter That Became a Global Media Machine
JCDecaux turned a piece of civic furniture into a 60-year business model. Now its hardest trick is making a million physical advertising panels behave like software without making cities feel like websites.
Holcim
Holcim is trying to turn the oldest ingredients in construction into a newer kind of business - one that sells lower-carbon materials, recycles yesterday’s buildings and captures the emissions its kilns cannot yet avoid.
Quantela Inc.
Quantela is a smart-city technology company that helps cities and communities digitize urban infrastructure through an AI- and IoT-powered data platform. Founded in 2015, it evolved from a dashboard tool into a full urban infrastructure platform spanning smart lighting, traffic, public safety, digital advertising and citizen services. Quantela is known for pioneering an 'outcomes-based' business model, funding projects up front in exchange for a share of the resulting revenue or savings, and operates across the Americas, EMEA, India and Asia-Pacific.
Jonathan Winer
Jonathan Winer is the co-founder and co-CEO of Sidewalk Infrastructure Partners (SIP), a New York-based firm that applies technology to physical infrastructure like power grids, roads, water and digital systems. Backed by Alphabet, Ontario Teachers' Pension Plan and StepStone, SIP has raised close to $1 billion and incubates operating companies such as virtual power plant Renew Home and grid-flexible data center developer Verrus. Before SIP, Winer ran investments for Alphabet's urban innovation platform Sidewalk Labs, founded the Asian clean-energy fund Nereus, and helped build the private equity business at the D. E. Shaw group. He is known for thematic, first-principles investing in what he calls the 'missing middle' between venture capital and traditional infrastructure.
Fletcher Wilson
Fletcher Wilson is the co-founder and CEO of Throne Labs, the company behind the largest network of connected public restrooms in the United States. A mechanical engineer trained at Penn and Stanford, he spent nearly a decade building InterVene, a medical-device startup, before turning his attention in 2020 to a problem hiding in plain sight: the disappearance of clean, accessible public bathrooms. Throne's solar-powered, sensor-equipped units deploy in under two hours, are free to use, and have logged more than a million uses across 20-plus cities. In October 2025 the company raised an initial $15 million Series B led by Brentwood Associates.