Alchera Technologies has raised £2.7 million in seed funding to scale its artificial intelligence (AI) platform for highways operators and local authorities, which the company says reduces the time needed to analyse transport data from weeks to seconds.
The round includes a £2 million investment led by Maven Capital Partners through the British Business Bank’s South West Investment Fund, alongside the Bayes Entrepreneurship Fund and The FSE Group. A further £700,000 comes in match funding from Innovate UK’s Investor Partnerships programme. Existing investor Cambridge Applied Research also took part in the round.
“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,” says Anna Jordan, co-founder and chief executive of Alchera Technologies.
How the platform works
Alchera’s software brings together open, customer-owned and third-party data, from bus location, traffic signal and vehicle movement feeds to contextual sources such as weather and air quality. It cleans and combines the information, then applies proprietary machine learning algorithms, including a patent-pending approach to traffic modelling, to identify patterns, flag performance issues and forecast outcomes. Teams can explore and share results through dashboards and application programming interfaces (APIs).
The company says the funding comes as highways operators and local authorities manage increasingly complex networks under tighter budgets, changing travel patterns, ageing infrastructure and growing climate resilience risks. The number of data sources is also growing, from connected vehicles, e-bikes and e-scooters to weather, air quality and event data.
Customers and projects
Alchera says its software is used by local authority transport planners, bus teams, permitting and roadworks teams, highways operators responsible for major roads, and their advisers and consultants. Its work spans local, regional and national networks.
Projects include multi-modal transport assessment in Cambridgeshire, major roadworks planning on the M25, and bus network performance analysis in Lancashire. 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.
Growth plans
Alchera was founded in 2016 and has more than doubled its customer count over the past 12 months. The company says it is on track to double it again this year. The new investment will be used to accelerate product development and make deployment faster for new customers.
“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,” adds Jordan.
“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,” says Rafi Khan, investment manager at Maven Capital Partners. “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.”
