Tranport data specialist Alchera raises £2.7M

Cambridge-founded Alchera Technologies has raised £2.7m in seed funding to expand its AI tools for road and public transport planning. The round was led by the British Business Bank’s South West Investment Fund, which put in £2m through Maven Capital Partners.

The rest of the money came from the Baves Entrepreneurship Fund, The FSE Group and Innovate UK’s Investor Partnership programme. Existing backer Cambridge Applied Research also joined the round. Alchera was founded in 2016 and works with local authorities, highways operators and their advisers.

Its platform pulls together transport and contextual data, then uses proprietary machine learning to show how networks are performing and where action may be needed. The company says that turns a job that can take weeks into one that takes seconds. That is the kind of claim that sounds neat until you remember how much bad infrastructure decision-making is really just a data problem in a slightly smarter coat.

The customer list includes Lancashire City Council and the City of York Council. Anna Jordan, Alchera’s co-founder and chief executive, says better data can reduce disruption from roadworks and make networks more reliable, resilient and affordable. The pitch is straightforward: when the information is scattered across systems, formats and teams, someone has to stitch it together before anyone can make a sane decision.