About Plexus Impact

Plexus helps planners, engineers, consultants, and project teams manage New York environmental reviews from initial screening through the project record.

Our mission

Make environmental review easier to manage.

New York needs affordable housing, supportive housing, transit, renewable energy, and other public infrastructure. Environmental review is essential to delivering those projects responsibly, but the process often requires teams to repeat the same research, trace the same sources, and coordinate work across separate files and email threads.

Plexus reduces that repeated work without weakening the review. It gathers available public information, records each source, and keeps calculations and specialist requests in the project record. This gives practitioners more time to assess the project itself.

To learn more about the planning calculations Plexus can help with, read our approach.

Where the idea came from

Founder & CEO

Erma Swartz

I studied urban planning at Columbia, and while I was there I kept drifting toward the technical side of the field: Python, GIS, environmental data, and machine learning alongside traditional planning work. In my final semester I took a class on environmental review. Working through one, I kept thinking that a tool should exist for this, and that most of what I was doing by hand was retrieval rather than judgment. When I graduated I decided to find out whether I could build it.

New York is where I studied and where I work, and it is the right place to start. SEQR and CEQR are demanding, the public record is enormous, and completed reviews show how the process runs in practice. There is real pressure to deliver housing, infrastructure, and renewable energy faster. I do not think the answer is a weaker review. There is a great deal we can do to make the process itself work better first.

COO

Talya Soytas

I came through the same academic program as Erma and studied environmental issues before that. I understood how strongly the built environment affects natural and human systems, and why responsible development requires careful assessment. I also saw how urgently New York needs affordable homes, supportive housing, and better transit, and how long those projects can remain in planning.

Plexus appealed to me because it aims to preserve the rigor of environmental review while making its research and coordination easier to manage. I want to make planners' work easier and help New York deliver public projects to residents sooner.

Help us build a tool that works for practitioners.

The screening is free, with no time limit. Try it on a real project and tell us what works, what does not, and what is missing.

Start a review, free →

Or tell us what you are working on.