The challenge
Today
An ocean of documents. No shared intelligence.
- Rules, precedents, and evidence buried across fragmented systems
- Every decision reinvents the wheel, costly and inconsistent
- Councils, consultants, and communities cannot see what the system fully contains
- High risk of appeals, delays, and missed environmental signals
With Shoal
Connected. Consistent. Decision ready intelligence.
- A growing national consent knowledge base, context beyond a single application
- Connected intelligence across your documents, precedent, and NZ practice
- Faster, more defensible consent decisions you can verify
Why Shoal
Extract and verify
Document-type extraction pipelines with confidence scoring and human review, from harvest and storage through to structured outputs you can validate, export, and defend.
Built from consent practice
Specialist assessment experience shapes extraction specs, QC rules, and product design. Our team works in the same documents practitioners use, informed by national science on cumulative effects and environmental modelling.
Human judgment, connected to place
Traceable citations and pilot support keep your standards central. Extracted data is designed to link to spatial context, catchments, zones, and coordinates, alongside the GIS and environmental layers you already use.
Research-backed, continuously improving
Language models, spatiotemporal datasets, and a curated knowledge base of legislation, plans, precedent, and published research. Sustained through MBIE-supported R&D and university partnerships, including UoA Newmarket Innovation Precinct.
Complement your workflow
Shoal empowers planners, consultants, and decision makers rather than replacing professional judgment.
Pilot partnerships
Work with us to shape how Shoal fits your organisation, with a fast iteration cycle as we refine outputs together.
How it works
Shoal brings fragmented consent information together, transforming it into actionable insights you can trust.
Connect
Upload consent documents and project context: applications, assessments, plans, and supporting evidence.
Analyse
Shoal searches NZ precedents, RMA rules, spatial context, and comparable consents from the national knowledge base.
Insight
Receive traceable findings: gaps, risks, precedents, and citations you can verify and defend.
Decide
Move to faster, more consistent consent decisions with intelligence grounded in New Zealand practice.
Who we serve
Consent intelligence for everyone involved in resource management decisions.
Councils
Consistent triage and defensible analysis of incoming applications, grounded in NZ precedent and traceable citations.
Consultants
Faster precedent research, gap analysis, and draft review, with outputs framed for technical and regulatory audiences.
Iwi & hapū
Tools to triage consents, understand environmental effects in rohe, and prepare informed engagement and submissions.
Applicants
Clearer pathways through complexity: fewer surprises, better prepared applications, and faster iteration.
From document analysis to structured intelligence
In the platform
Analyse application packs
Upload consent documents and project context. Shoal surfaces gaps, risks, precedents, and audience-specific insights, with traceable citations back to source. Your data stays in your secure account and is not used to train external models.
Ground in national context
Every analysis draws on a growing national consent knowledge base, comparable consents, RMA and plan context, not one application in isolation.
Triage and decide faster
Consistent intelligence for incoming applications, submissions, and complex multi-party consents, supporting faster, more defensible decisions.
With partners
Structure consent data
Document-type extraction pipelines with confidence scoring and QC to harvest, structure, and export consent intelligence into databases you can validate and use. Developing in-house solutions for local data harvesting, extraction, and structured consent intelligence.
Connect to spatial context
Outputs designed to link to catchments, zones, coordinates, and environmental layers, alongside the GIS and monitoring data your team already works with.
Co-design through pilots
Work with us to define questions of interest, refine extraction and workflows, and align outputs with your organisation's standards, with platform and services tailored together.
Partners, funding and support
Supported by an MBIE New to R&D Grant, Takuhe Pihinga R&D
Based in the University of Auckland Newmarket Innovation Precinct