M25 roadworks are planned well in advance. Alchera Technologies, a startup based in Cambridge, claims its software can predict motorway traffic up to two years in advance, allowing planners to choose dates that cause less disruption.
The company has raised £2.7 million in seed funding so as to offer its solution to more councils and highway operators.
The £2 million comes from Maven Capital Partners through the British Business Bank’s £ 200 million South West Investment Fund, with the Bayes Entrepreneurship Fund and The FSE Group also taking part. Additionally, Innovate UK’s Investor Partnerships programme contributed £700,000, and Cambridge Applied Research, an existing investor, also took part.
How Jordan went from software engineer to CEO
Anna Jordan, one of the co-founders and CEO of Alchera, joined the company through Cambridge Applied Research, a company that specialises in setting up start-ups. She started as a software engineer and worked with several of the start-ups it created, including Alchera.
Alchera was founded in Cambridge in 2016. By April 2021, Jordan was its head of operations and co-founder. She believes data should be considered a public good and that the transport sector does not invest enough in it.
Jordan said, “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.”
What Alchera offers, and who its competitors are
Alchera’s platform combines customer-owned open data with third-party data, including information on bus locations, traffic signals, vehicle movements, weather, and air quality. It cleans this data and applies machine learning, including a patent-pending traffic model, to identify patterns, highlight problems, and predict future outcomes.
Teams can view the results via dashboards and APIs. Alchera claims that its platform reduces analysis time from weeks to seconds.
Alchera offers traffic predictions up to two years in advance to help plan roadworks on the M25. The companies Connect Plus and Connect Plus Services, which manage the motorway on behalf of Highways England, received the Digital Initiative of the Year award at the 2024 British Construction Industry Awards for their collaboration with Alchera to extend the working windows.
In Lancashire, Alchera examines more than 300 junctions and 85,000 network links to identify bus problems and help decide where to allocate investments.
The UK mobility technology sector is highly competitive. VivaCity, a company that makes roadside AI sensors, raised £7 million to expand in the United States. TransHumanity, a company spun out of Loughborough University, raised £400,000 in September 2025 for AptIq, an AI tool that speeds up transport analysis. GoodVision, a London-based startup, had raised €3.7 million by early 2023.
Although VivaCity produces its own hardware, Alchera uses data operators already hold. TransHumanity offers a similar value proposition, suggesting that speed alone may not be enough to distinguish between these solutions.
MarketsandMarkets forecasts that the global intelligent transportation systems market will increase from $42.55 billion in 2025 to $55.36 billion by 2030, representing an annual growth rate of 5.4 per cent. The market size exceeds that of Alchera’s area, and growth is steady rather than rapid.
A £2.7M seed round with public funding involved
Maven has also invested £15M in Chorus Intelligence, a company that produces digital investigation software, and an additional £1.25M in Zing, a partner of Twilio. The only investor that is listed as having taken part in this round is Cambridge Applied Research.
Rafi Khan, an investment manager with Maven Capital Partners, stated: “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.”
The funding will accelerate product development, particularly across engineering and product, and support faster customer deployment. Alchera currently has a team of 15, with 3 new hires onboarded since the round closed, and maintains a gender split where women represent approximately one-third of the overall team, leadership, and board.
Over the next 12 months, the company aims to double its recurring customer base, with a 36-month goal of scaling into a multi-million-pound ARR business and becoming the de facto evidence provider for transport infrastructure decision-making.
