Pitch · investor / partnership one-pager
The Living Map
Google Maps shows where things are. HortiMark adds when they happen — a citizen-observed temporal layer for the living world.
The one-line pitch
“Maps shows space. We add time.”
A distributed network of horticulturally-literate humans observing the living world — bloom waves, pest fronts, leaf-fall, pollen, disease — pinned to postcodes, updated daily, with provenance. The temporal layer Google can't build from satellites alone.
01 · The gap
Maps is a snapshot. The living world isn't.
What Maps knows
Roads, buildings, business hours, traffic. Static or near-static spatial facts derived from satellites, Street View and business listings.
What Maps can't see
When the cherries broke bud in SW19 this week. Where oak processionary moth crossed the M25. Which postcode hit peak birch pollen yesterday. Where ash dieback advanced this season.
02 · The wedge
A human sensor network with botanical literacy
HortiMark is already an RHS-grade revision tool used by trained gardeners, growers and horticulture students. Every user is a calibrated observer. Every observation is a data point Google can't buy from a satellite vendor.
First flower, leaf-out, fruit-set
Pest sightings, disease fronts
Observed pollen + bloom intensity
Drought stress, canopy loss
Year-on-year phenology drift
Trained, traceable human observers
03 · Why now
The pieces are already on the board
- Google ships the Pollen API, Air Quality API and Weather API — all modelled. They need ground truth.
- Ash dieback, OPM, box tree moth, xylella — UK biosecurity is now a geospatial problem with no live consumer-facing map.
- Climate adaptation is moving from policy to property. Phenology drift is the most visible signal a homeowner experiences.
- HortiMark's Observatory already captures postcode-resolved sightings today. The data shape is proven.
04 · What it looks like on Maps
A temporal overlay, not another POI layer
Time slider
Scrub a year. Watch the bloom wave move from Cornwall to Aberdeen in 10 seconds. Watch a pest front advance week by week.
Postcode cards
Tap any UK postcode: what's flowering, what pests are active, what pollen is peaking, what's stressed — observed, not modelled.
Ground-Truth API
Sell verified observations back to Google, DEFRA, councils, insurers, forestry, and the pollen/allergy industry.
Climate dashboard
Per-postcode phenology drift vs 30-year baseline. The most legible climate signal a homeowner has ever seen for their own street.
05 · Why Google should care
The defensible asset is the humans
Satellites can't tell a sycamore from a maple. Street View can't tell you a tree is dying. Crowdsourced apps without botanical training produce noisy data Google can't trust.
HortiMark's user base is self-selecting for plant literacy — they're here to pass RHS Level 2. That makes our observations the cleanest botanical ground-truth dataset on the consumer internet.
Google ships the rendering layer and APIs. We ship the observed reality. Partnership, data licence, or acquisition — all three work.
06 · The ask
What we want from a Maps conversation
1
Maps Platform access
Tiles + Pollen + Air Quality + Weather APIs at partner rates so we can ship the temporal overlay at consumer scale.
2
Data partnership
A pilot where HortiMark observations validate or enrich Google's modelled Pollen / Air Quality outputs.
3
Distribution
A path to surface the Living Map layer inside Maps itself for UK users.
07 · Traction today
Already shipping
hortimark.com
Live in production
UK-wide
Postcode coverage
RHS L2/L3
Trained user base
Days
Ship cycle on Lovable Cloud
The exam-revision product is the wedge: it builds the trained-observer network we then point at the map.
08 · Team
Built by horticulturists, not just engineers
Founder · domain expert
RHS-trained horticulturist building the product they wished existed while studying. Deep network across UK growers, gardens and horticultural education.
Engineering
Shipped on Lovable Cloud — full-stack TypeScript, Supabase, Google Maps Platform. Weekly release cadence, public API live.
Next step: a 20-minute demo.
We'll scrub a year of UK bloom + pest data on Maps, live, and walk through the Ground-Truth API.