Civico now publishes two radars next to the Startup Map: a technology radar and a use-case radar. This first deep-dive explains what they show today, and where we would not lean on them yet. The scoring rules are on the Method page, and every number below can be recomputed from the downloadable CSV files.
What a radar adds to a deal list
A list of deals tells you what happened. A radar asks two further questions for each technology or use case. How much is going on around it (attractiveness)? And could a corporate, asset owner or agency realistically act on it (addressability)? The approach adapts the external assessment portfolio from the Rohrbeck Heger radar framework, and the habit of testing rankings under more than one measure from Holger Ernst’s patent-portfolio work.
We use funded startups, tenders and policy moves as the evidence base, not patents. Much of urban technology is software, data and services, which patent counts under-read. Patents remain a planned secondary layer for hardware-heavy areas.
Three use cases clear the bar to act
Under the rules on the Method page, an item is an “Act” when its attractiveness is 50 or more out of 100 and its addressability is 3 or more out of 5. In this window, three use cases pass:
→ Automated logistics hubs (attractiveness 61). Four pieces of evidence across Singapore, India and Vietnam, including a S$260M Tuas facility breaking ground and a $50M PSA and Granite Asia fund. Activity rose in the latest four weeks.
→ EV charging and battery swapping networks (attractiveness 55). Six pieces of evidence across India, Malaysia and Singapore. Entrants are plentiful, and Grab’s trial of an in-app network aggregating 3,000+ charging points points to aggregation moving in.
→ Renewable generation and power-purchase models (technology radar, attractiveness 75). The technology itself is mainstream. The room for new value sits in how power is bought: direct clean-power purchasing opened to all industries in Thailand, a household rooftop-solar support scheme, and project finance for commercial and industrial solar.
Attractive does not mean addressable
Electric vehicle platforms score highest on attractiveness (84) and are still a “Watch”. Two rounds, Simple Energy and Ultraviolette, account for 44% of its disclosed capital, and the money mostly funds manufacturing scale, which makes it hard for an outside scout to add value. Transmission and interconnection (71) is similar: policy-led, long-cycle and tender-driven. This split is the point of scoring two dimensions.
Where we would not lean yet
Eight of the 26 radar positions change a lot when we recompute them under different attractiveness measures. They include cooling-as-a-service, modular worker accommodation and autonomous mobility pilots. For these, a small number of items drive the score, and one more deal or tender could move them. The radar flags them as “rank unstable” and shows the confidence level for each item.
The window is also short, at about seven weeks. Momentum figures compare recent weeks with a short earlier period, so treat them as indicative. They get more reliable with every weekly update.
What happens next
→ The database updates weekly, and the radars recompute each time.
→ Each month we take one theme and go deep, like this note.
→ Each quarter we publish a full report with the method, the data and the findings.
→ If you see a deal we missed or a judgement you disagree with, tell us with a source.
Sources and method. Evidence: the deals and signals files, each row linked to a public source. Judgements: the radar definitions, with a written reason and review date for each. Method lineage: Rohrbeck Heger, Foresight Radars: Radar Framework & Methodology (2020); Ernst, Patent portfolios for strategic R&D planning, Journal of Engineering and Technology Management (1998); Fabry, Ernst, Langholz and Köster, World Patent Information (2006); Mogee, Research-Technology Management (1991); CambridgeIP, IP Landscape sample report (2011).