Alchera aims to turn weeks of data analysis into same-day decisions for highways operators and local authorities. Its latest funding round includes a £2m 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 in the funding round.
Alchera aims to reduce the time needed to analyse transport data from weeks to seconds, transforming how major infrastructure decisions get made. Local authorities, highways operators and their advisors use Alchera’s software to plan roadworks, assess bus performance, understand traffic patterns and strengthen network resilience, backed by validated, real-world evidence.
The platform uses open, customer-owned and third-party data, from bus location, traffic signal and vehicle movement data to contextual sources such as weather and air quality. It cleans and combines this information, then uses 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.
Alchera is already used by transport and infrastructure teams across the sector, including local authority transport planners, bus teams, permitting and roadworks teams; highways operators responsible for major roads; and their advisors and consultants to speed up decision making. Its 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.
Two of the company’s existing projects show the kinds of high-value decisions its platform is already supporting. On the M25, Alchera provides predicted traffic flows up to 24 months in advance to support roadworks scheduling. In Lancashire, it 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.