We started with the problem every location-dependent product had.
The question that started Neighbourly was simple: why does every Canadian product that works with addresses have to build the same location data infrastructure from scratch? Address validation, neighbourhood lookup, boundary rendering, demographic context — it's the same undifferentiated plumbing, built over and over again by every team in the industry.
We'd seen it across verticals — in the data engineering backlogs of MLS platforms, in the feature queues of insurance underwriting tools, and in the datasets that urban analytics teams were stitching together manually. People need neighbourhood context. Products want to show it. But the data was fragmented, the geocoding was generic, and the neighbourhoods were algorithm-generated boundaries with no real connection to how Canadians actually talk about where they live.
So we built the infrastructure layer the market was missing. Canadian-specific, human-curated where it matters — and delivered as a REST API so any product team can use it without running their own PostGIS cluster or negotiating data agreements with Statistics Canada.
Neighbourly is that layer. We're early, but the foundation is solid — and we're expanding coverage, data depth, and API surface every quarter.