Maven leads £2M of Alchera’s £2.7M seed to bring AI traffic forecasting to UK roads

Cambridge startup Alchera has raised £2.7 million in seed funding to push its traffic-forecasting software deeper into UK transport planning. Maven Capital Partners led the round with £2 million, while Innovate UK added £700,000 through its Investor Partnerships programme. Cambridge Applied Research also took part, along with the Bayes Entrepreneurship Fund and The FSE Group.

The company’s headline claim is eye-catching: it says it can predict motorway traffic up to two years in advance. That is meant to help councils and highway operators pick roadworks dates that cause less disruption. On the M25, where roadworks are planned far ahead anyway, Alchera says its software gives planners a clearer way to choose the least painful windows.

Anna Jordan, the co-founder and CEO, came into the business through Cambridge Applied Research. She started as a software engineer, later became head of operations by April 2021, and now argues that transport data should be treated as a public good. Her pitch is that the sector already has the data, just not in one place, and that decisions are still being made slowly because the information is scattered across systems, formats and teams.

Alchera’s platform pulls together customer-owned open data and third-party feeds, including bus locations, traffic signals, vehicle movements, weather and air quality. It cleans the data, runs machine learning on it, and serves the results through dashboards and APIs. The company says that cuts analysis time from weeks to seconds. It also says its customer base has more than doubled over the past year, though it has not disclosed revenue.

The round lands in a crowded market. Maven points to an underserved segment, but Alchera is not the only company trying to turn transport data into faster decisions. Some rivals build their own hardware; Alchera leans on data operators already hold. That distinction matters, because in this market speed alone is not much of a moat if everyone is promising it. The funding will go into engineering, product, and faster customer deployment, and Alchera wants to double its recurring customer base in the next 12 months.