Ascend Spatial Labs is a geospatial intelligence company founded by Nathaniel Phiri, targeting the infrastructure data gap across Southern Africa. I joined as CTO and built the technology platform from the ground up. This is a brief account of the technical decisions behind it.

What the Platform Needed to Do

The requirements were straightforward but covered a lot of ground. A public-facing website that communicated the company's services clearly and professionally. A client portal where project stakeholders could track engagements, access deliverables, and interact with the team. An architecture that could scale as the company grew without requiring a rebuild.

The Stack

Frontend — Next.js: Next.js handles the public website and client portal in a single codebase. Server-side rendering gives us fast load times and good SEO out of the box, both of which matter for a B2B services company trying to reach government and development sector clients.

CMS — Sanity: Content for the website, including service descriptions, project case studies, and team profiles, is managed through Sanity. Non-technical team members can update content without touching code.

Authentication — Clerk: The client portal requires secure access control. Clerk handles authentication, session management, and user roles cleanly without requiring a custom auth implementation.

Email — Resend: Transactional emails, including contact form submissions, client notifications, and onboarding flows, run through Resend.

Maps — Mapbox: Given that Ascend's work is fundamentally spatial, the platform needed a capable map layer. Mapbox handles geospatial visualisation on the site, including the project locations map.

What I Would Do Differently

Building a production platform for a startup while simultaneously doing other work is a balancing act. If I were starting again, I would invest more time upfront in defining the client portal data model before building the UI. The schema evolved during development in ways that required rework.

That said, the platform is live, functional, and serving its purpose.

The Broader Point

Building ASL's platform reinforced something my good friend Conrad Zidana is always stressing: climate and geospatial work increasingly requires people who can sit at the intersection of domain science and software engineering. The ability to build the tool, not just use it, changes what you can contribute to an organisation.

That is the space I want to occupy.

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