Built on New Year's Day. Fuelled by mild outrage.

It was New Year's Day. Anthony – Metis's founder and, for the time being, its entire engineering department – was watching a video about the state of UK civic technology. The specific subject was Birmingham City Council, which had managed to spend tens of millions of pounds on an Oracle ERP system so catastrophically unsuited to purpose that it contributed to the largest local authority bankruptcy in British history.

The video wasn't particularly cheerful. But it pointed at something interesting: the UK has enormous amounts of valuable public data. Planning applications, building permits, development proposals. Data that signals exactly where money is about to be spent, where ground is about to break, where opportunity is clustering. All of it public record. Almost none of it usable.

Not because it doesn't exist. Because it's scattered across 300+ council portals, each built to a different spec, each updated on a different schedule, each requiring a human to manually click through pagination to find anything.

Property developers, builders, architects and subcontractors were either missing this entirely, or spending hours a week doing the kind of work that computers are, frankly, much better at.

Anthony – a senior systems engineer who spends his days building the brains behind some of the more complex and consequential systems you've probably never heard of – decided to spend his evenings building something for this one. Metis was registered a few weeks later.