Alchera Technologies has raised £2.7 million in seed funding to accelerate growth and scale its AI platform for transport authorities and operators.
The round into the Cambridge-based company includes £2m led by Maven Capital Partners through the British Business Bank’s South West Investment Fund, alongside Bayes Entrepreneurship Fund and The FSE Group, with additional backing from Innovate UK and existing investor Cambridge Applied Research.
The funding comes at a time when highways operators and local authorities are managing increasingly complex transport networks while facing tighter budgets, changing travel patterns, ageing infrastructure and growing climate resilience risks.
Meanwhile, the number of data sources keeps growing, from connected vehicles, e-bikes and e-scooters to weather, air quality and event data. Used together, they can give a much richer picture of how networks perform – but only if decision-makers can wrangle them quickly and accurately enough to decide where to focus resources and how to improve services.
Alchera reduces the time needed to analyse transport data from weeks to seconds, transforming how major infrastructure decisions get made. Local authorities, highways operators and their advisors use Alchera’s software to plan roadworks, assess bus performance, understand traffic patterns and strengthen network resilience – all backed by validated, real-world evidence. With Alchera, they can deliver more efficient services and protect their bottom line.
The platform brings together open, customer-owned and third-party data – from bus location, traffic signal and vehicle movement data to contextual sources such as weather and air quality. It cleans and combines this information, then uses proprietary machine learning algorithms, including a patent-pending approach to traffic modelling, to spot patterns, flag performance issues and forecast outcomes. Teams can explore and share results through dashboards and APIs.
Alchera is already used by transport and infrastructure teams across the sector, including local authority transport planners, bus teams, permitting and roadworks teams; highways operators responsible for major roads; and their advisors and consultants to speed up decision making. Its work spans local, regional and national networks, including multi-modal transport assessment in Cambridgeshire, major roadworks planning on the M25, and bus network performance analysis in Lancashire.
Two of the company’s existing projects show the kinds of high-value decisions its platform is already supporting. On the M25, Alchera provides predicted traffic flows up to 24 months in advance to support roadworks scheduling. In Lancashire, it analyses more than 300 junctions and 85,000 network links to help identify bus network performance issues, prioritise investment and validate the impact of improvements.
Anna Jordan, co-founder and CEO of Alchera Technologies, said: “Every journey – to work, to school, to an appointment – depends on decisions someone made about a road or a bus route.
“Right now, these decisions often take weeks; despite the necessary data existing, it’s scattered across systems, formats and teams. We’ve seen how when you put that data together, you’re no longer making decisions on instinct and incomplete data but with the full picture instead.
“That directly has real-world impacts like reduced disruption from roadworks and more robust networks – making transport infrastructure more reliable, resilient and affordable for all road users.”
Founded in Cambridge in 2016, Alchera has grown from a specialist transport data company into a platform used across local, regional and national transport networks.
Over the past 12 months, it has more than doubled its customer count and is on track to double again this year. The new investment will help Alchera accelerate product development, and make deployment faster for new customers.
Rafi Khan, investment director at Maven Capital Partners, said: “Transport and infrastructure operators are sitting on vast amounts of data but lack the tools to turn it into fast, confident decisions – and that problem has been chronically underserved by the market.
“Alchera has built a genuinely differentiated AI platform that addresses this head-on, with proven results for its customers within an underserved segment of the transport and infrastructure market.
“We’re thrilled to be backing Anna and the team at this exciting stage of their journey and look forward to partnering with them to accelerate growth.”