Today we're announcing that Alchera has raised £2.7 million in seed funding. The round includes £2 million led by Maven Capital Partners through the British Business Bank's South West Investment Fund, alongside the Bayes Entrepreneurship Fund, The FSE Group - and £700,00 in match funding from Innovate UK's Investor Partnerships programme. Existing investor Cambridge Applied Research also participated in the funding round. Thank you to all of them for backing us.
Why this matters
Every journey - to work, to school, to an appointment - depends on decisions someone made about a road or a bus route. Right now, those decisions often take weeks. The data needed to make them exists, but it's scattered across systems, formats and teams.
That data keeps growing, from connected vehicles, e-bikes and e-scooters to weather, air quality and events. Meanwhile, highways operators and local authorities are running more complex networks with tighter budgets, changing travel patterns, ageing infrastructure and growing climate risks. All this data could give them a much richer picture of their networks, but only if they can pull it together quickly and accurately enough to act on it.
What we do
Alchera cuts transport data analysis from weeks to seconds. Our platform brings together open, customer-owned and third-party data - bus locations, traffic signals, vehicle movements, weather, air quality - then cleans and combines it. Our own algorithms, including a patent-pending approach to traffic modelling, then spot patterns, flag performance issues and forecast outcomes. Teams can explore and share the results through dashboards and APIs.
When you put that data together, you're no longer deciding on instinct and incomplete information. You have the full picture. In practice, that means less disruption from roadworks and more robust networks, which makes transport more reliable, resilient and affordable for everyone who uses it.
What changes for highways operators
Before: A highways operator needs to decide when to close a lane for roadworks, or where to invest to make a route more resilient. The data they need exists, but it's spread across different systems, formats and teams. Someone has to find it, clean it and stitch it together by hand. That takes weeks. By the time the analysis is ready, it's often too late. The cost shows up later, in disruption for drivers and budget spent in the wrong places.
With Alchera: The same data - traffic flows, vehicle movements, weather and more - is already cleaned and combined. The operator asks the question and gets an answer the same day, backed by validated, real-world evidence. As an example, on the M25, that means planning roadworks around traffic predicted up to 24 months ahead, rather than finding out about clashes when queues build. Decisions are faster, easier to defend and cheaper to get right.
What's next
Since our founding, we've grown into a platform used across local, regional and national networks. We more than doubled our customer count in the past 12 months and are on track to double it again this year. This investment will help us build the product faster and get new customers up and running more quickly.
Our roads are under pressure, budgets are tight, and people rightly expect AI used in public services to be trustworthy. We believe it can be, and that the answer lies in data that already exists, put to work properly.
Anna Jordan, co-founder and CEO
