Urban planners. Spatial analysts. Data scientists.The people who built GUS are the people who’ll sit with your team.
SilaCities is built by urban planners, spatial analysts, data scientists and engineers for the teams that shape cities. Founded in the UAE in 2022, deployed with governments, consultancies, developers and investors across the Gulf and beyond.
Founded on one question. And the frustration of answering it six months late.
"Why do we still plan cities using data that is years out of date?" The question behind every line of code in GUS.
SilaCities was born from frustration. Our founders, urban planners who had spent years on Gulf masterplans, kept running into the same wall. By the time traditional data was collected and analysed, the city had already changed.
We spun out from Sila Insights, bringing years of social-analytics experience and a sharper vision. Build a platform that makes evidence itself live, cited, and defensible.
The region matters. Major Gulf cities are transforming at a pace slower tools cannot keep up with. So we built for that pace first, then widened. Arabic is a first language in GUS, with dialect-aware understanding across the Gulf, Levant and North Africa.
Today we deploy with governments, consultancies, master developers and investors. Same platform. Different questions.
What we’re here for.
Mission
Give every city real-time, defensible evidence. So decisions about how people live, move and feel are made on facts.
Vision
A world where every urban decision, from where to build, to what to prioritise, to who to listen to first, is informed by what people actually experience.
A platform, the questions it answers, and the sessions that put them to use.
GUS is the product. Six analytical areas are the questions it answers. Most engagements begin with a two-hour session around a question your team is already stuck on. By the end, you leave with your city live on the platform, a cited answer, and the brief to back it.
The platform
GUS, our Geospatial Understanding System. Nine tools on one source of truth: Chat, Atlas, Map View, GUS Consult, Data Management, GUS Fieldnotes, GUS SQUID, GUS DAT, GUS Plan Assessment.
The analytical areas
Spatial economics, city behaviour, urban modelling, consumer research, development research, sentiment and satisfaction. Every area drawn from the same neighbourhood grid, so findings always agree.
Working sessions
Two hours with a spatial analyst and a platform engineer. Your question, loaded into your own deployment, answered with cited evidence by the end of the call.
Full deployments and consulting
End-to-end rollouts for governments, consultancies and developers. Representative timeline: eight weeks from kickoff to the first decision made on GUS evidence. Consulting engagements run alongside.
What we refuse to compromise on.
The platform was built by planners. If you book a working session, the people who show up are the same ones who designed the tool, trained the models and shipped the last release. That is the first rule, and it shapes every other one.
We treat people as a first-class signal. How residents live, move and feel sits alongside demographics and economics in every view. Lived experience carries the same weight as spatial data. A city is nothing without the people who live in it.
Every answer GUS gives you carries a citation to the exact source and date. When the signal is not there, GUS says so instead of guessing. We treat refusal as a feature.
The technology gets out of the way. GUS exists to make city teams faster, sharper and more confident. The decisions stay with the people making them.
The people building it.
Decisions get made by the people who built the thing. No account layer. When you book a session, the people who show up are the same ones who designed the platform, trained the models, and shipped the last release.
Urban planner turned technologist. Spent a decade on Gulf masterplans before concluding the data was the problem.
Leads strategic direction and operations. Thirty years across consulting, infrastructure and urban delivery.
Leads research and methodology. Designs the frameworks that turn signals into evidence.
Guides clients through strategic deployments, from first question to first decision.
Turns urban data into insight. Leads the analytics team that sits behind every deliverable.
Runs the delivery machine. Makes sure every engagement ships on time and on scope.
We’re hiring.
Planners, spatial analysts, ML engineers, data scientists. If you want to build urban intelligence that decisions get made on, we want to meet you.
One team behind every deployment.
We are positioned where our clients are, and where the next wave of urban transformation is happening.
Future 100 Company. Twice.
Selected in 2023 and 2024 by the UAE Ministry of Economy as one of the country’s most innovative companies. Recognised for pioneering work in urban intelligence and Arabic-first AI.
What we publish so you don’t have to take our word for it.
Enterprise security
Strict deployment isolation, signed exports, secure data handling. Built for governments and sensitive data.
Transparent methods
Documented pipeline from ingest to delivery. Every claim cited. Known limits disclosed.
Editorial standards
Two-stage fact-checking. Inline corrections. Named authors. Published standards we hold ourselves to.
Public transparency
Standing disclosures on funding, data-sharing, paid placement. Public record of what we commit to.
Bring us a question about your city.
Clients, press, partners, or joining the team. Same door. We reply within one business day.
hello@silacities.com
For press, partnerships, or speaking engagements, go direct. No form.