A local builder turns family knowledge into a platform
He is a member of Ottawa's Bassi family, which works in construction and development. "I've been involved in construction and real estate my whole life. These were like my first words," he said. His family's construction and development business was founded in 1963, so the industry Bassi is now building software for is one he was raised inside of.
That background has become the foundation for a new platform. Bassi built Asset Avenue, a tool that maps municipal planning applications across Ottawa and other cities. "It's all public data that I've kind of just put into a certain way for others to understand more clearly," he said. The information itself already exists in city planning files. What Bassi has done is organize it so it's easier to read.
What Asset Avenue actually shows
The platform is built around three components. Development Tracker maps planning applications digitally, showing details like height, unit counts and application status for proposed developments.
The third piece, Deal Room, provides financial analysis for multi-family properties using capitalization rates and debt-service coverage ratios, the kind of numbers investors use to judge whether a project pencils out.
Ottawa's data, built with AI but not run on it
Bassi used AI to help write the software's code, but the platform's calculations rely on coded math rather than AI-generated output. That distinction matters for a tool whose entire purpose is showing accurate zoning limits and financial figures to people making real decisions about Ottawa properties. The underlying numbers come from fixed formulas, not a model's best guess.
Beyond Ottawa
Asset Avenue currently covers Ottawa, Toronto and Calgary, with plans to expand to seven more cities including Vancouver.
How Bassi plans to make money
For now, Bassi plans to offer free access to most of the platform's functions. If he does eventually monetize it, he said, "it'll be something most likely that's on the smaller side of a monthly membership or a by-deal membership." That suggests a light-touch approach rather than locking the core mapping and tracking tools behind a paywall from the outset.
Part of a wider pattern in Ottawa's startup scene
Ottown covered another entry in that series last month: ottown's earlier report on Anthony Balatti, founder of The 25th Hour, a venture built to help people reclaim time in their schedules. Both stories point to a local pattern of young founders turning personal or family experience into software aimed at solving problems they know firsthand, whether that's time management or, in Bassi's case, reading a city's planning data.
Sources: Ottawa Business Journal
