Alchera Technologies, a transport data analytics startup, has raised £2.7 million in seed funding. 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, with a further £700,000 in match funding from Innovate UK’s Investor Partnerships programme. Existing investor Cambridge Applied Research also participated.
Alchera Technologies turns weeks of data analysis into same-day decisions for highways operators and local authorities. Local authority transport planners, bus teams, permitting and roadworks teams, highways operators responsible for major roads, and their advisors and consultants use Alchera Technologies’ software to plan roadworks, assess bus performance, understand traffic patterns and strengthen network resilience. Decisions are backed by validated, real-world evidence so users can deliver more efficient services and protect their bottom line.
The platform brings together open, customer-owned and third-party data, including bus location, traffic signal and vehicle movement data, alongside contextual sources such as weather and air quality. This information is cleaned and combined, then processed using 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, helping them decide where to focus resources and how to improve services across increasingly complex transport networks.
Alchera Technologies’ 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. On the M25, Alchera Technologies provides predicted traffic flows up to 24 months in advance to support roadworks scheduling. In Lancashire, the platform 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.
Founded in Cambridge in 2016, Alchera Technologies has grown from a specialist transport data company into a platform used across local, regional and national transport networks. Over the past 12 months, Alchera Technologies has more than doubled its customer count and is on track to double again this year. The new investment will help Alchera Technologies accelerate product development and make deployment faster for new customers.
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.
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.
