New TNO spin-off Scenexus secures EUR 1.6 million investment

The Hague, 14 January, 2025 – TNO today announced the launch of Scenexus, a new spin-off company specializing in enterprise software for urban planning. Scenexus offers cities and urban planners a cutting-edge Software-as-a-Service solution that generates accurate multi-faceted insights into urgent challenges and developments in urban areas. By creating digital twins of a city or region, decision makers, planners and engineers can assess the exact impact of their ideas in just minutes instead of days.

Digital Twins
Creating so-called digital twins of a city or region by combining multiple rich data sets on Scenexus’ software platform, planners and engineers can assess the exact impact of ideas and alterations. This enables cities to address urgent challenges, such as the housing crisis, congestion and environmental issues. Cities like Amsterdam, San Diego, Singapore and Breda already rely on this innovative technology.

Up to 1,000 times faster

At the heart of Scenexus’ Urban Strategy platform are powerful algorithms running on graphical processing units (GPUs) – the same processors at the center of video gaming and AI technology. The GPU implementation enables Scenexus to process thousands of calculations in parallel, achieving results up to 1,000 times faster than leading planning software on the market. This allows the Scenexus’ clients to execute exponentially more projects per year by reducing the time needed to plan and develop new, effective urban concepts. Urban Strategy is multi-faceted and multi-dimensional, allowing users to view the impact of developments on various factors such as traffic, livability, resident sentiment, financial growth, safety, greenhouse gas emissions, and well-being.

Jeroen Borst, co-founder and CEO Scenexus: “Our vision is to empower cities globally with our digital twin technology, enabling them to anticipate and shape the future of urban development, ensuring sustainable and vibrant communities for generations to come. With LUMO Labs and TNO, we have the additional capital, expertise and support we need to for our next steps to turn this vision into reality.”

“Digitalization holds the key to solving many of the social, environmental, and economic challenges we face today. Successful and sustainable digitalization requires the combined and continued impact of multiple cross-sector systemic innovations beyond the individual user”, says Andy Lürling, Founding Partner LUMO Labs. “This is certainly true for Scenexus. With Scenexus, cities directly save time, money, and effort, and uncover unforeseen challenges before they arise. At the same time it enables lasting improvement of the city’s livability and safety, and the well-being of residents and visitors.”

Tjark Tjin-A-Tsoi, CEO TNO: “At TNO, our mission is to pioneer breakthrough technologies that tackle society’s most urgent challenges. Scenexus, a TNO spin-off, exemplifies this commitment. As part of our strategy, we take an active role in nurturing and empowering spin-offs and deep tech startups, guiding them toward rapid growth and meaningful impact—often in close collaboration with visionary venture capital partners like LUMO Labs”.

Sven Bakkes, Founding Partner LUMO Labs, adds: “Scenexus is the inaugural investment from our newly established LUMO Rise Fund. We are very happy to be joining forces with TNO on this co-investment and support Scenexus going forward with the roll-out of their groundbreaking software platform, previously known as ‘Urban Strategy’.”