URBAN-X’s goal – shared by MINI and Urban.US – is to find the best startups and most creative founders working on urban innovation and help scale those ideas to 100 cities over the next five years. The program offers startups an immersive five months of help, including business and technical support, product development and branding support, as well as mentorship and connections to customers and investors. “Cities are where the growth is and where the majority of the world’s population currently lives,” says Micah Kotch. “If you want to solve the world’s problems, you have to solve urban problems.”…

The URBAN-X programme worked for RoadBotics, a startup with a simple solution to a long-running problem: maintaining road surfaces. Ever since the Romans laid down roads, someone has had to drive along inspecting the concrete for telltale cracks – first it was via chariot, and now it’s trained pavement engineers in the back of a pickup-truck, notes Mark DeSantis, CEO of RoadBotics.
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