Anna Jordan's Alchera Raises £2.7 Million to Forecast Britain's Traffic Years Ahead With AI

Every major roadworks scheme on a motorway involves a difficult trade-off. Close lanes at the wrong time and traffic backs up for miles, costing drivers time, businesses money and the economy productivity. Plan well, and disruption can be minimised. Alchera Technologies, a Cambridge-based startup led by co-founder and chief executive Anna Jordan, has built an artificial intelligence platform to help transport authorities get those decisions right, and it now has fresh capital to scale.

Alchera has raised a £2.7 million seed round, announced on October 13. Maven Capital Partners invested £2 million through the British Business Bank's £200 million South West Investment Fund, and Innovate UK's Investor Partnerships programme contributed £700,000. The Bayes Entrepreneurship Fund, The FSE Group and existing investor Cambridge Applied Research also took part.

Seeing traffic two years ahead

Alchera's platform pulls together a transport operator's own data with a wide range of third-party sources, including bus locations, traffic signal data, vehicle movements, weather and air quality. It cleans and combines that information and then applies machine learning, including a patent-pending traffic model, to forecast how networks will behave. Results are delivered through dashboards and application programming interfaces that planners can plug into their existing systems.

The company says its technology cuts analysis that once took weeks down to seconds. Its most prominent use case is on the M25, the orbital motorway around London and one of Europe's busiest roads, where Alchera predicts traffic up to two years ahead to help plan roadworks. Connect Plus Services, which manages the M25 on behalf of the national highways authority, won the Digital Initiative of the Year award at the 2024 British Construction Industry Awards for its work with Alchera.

The platform is also being used on public transport. In Lancashire, Alchera analyses more than 300 junctions and 85,000 network links to identify where buses are being delayed and to guide investment decisions on where improvements will deliver the greatest benefit.

A founder shaped by engineering

Jordan began her career as a software engineer and joined the company through Cambridge Applied Research, a venture builder that creates and supports early-stage technology businesses. Alchera was founded in Cambridge in 2016, and Jordan rose to become head of operations and a co-founder before taking the chief executive role.

She is outspoken about what she sees as a chronic problem in the sector: transport organisations, in her view, underinvest in data, even though data is a shared resource that could improve decisions across entire networks. Alchera's pitch is that better use of information that authorities already hold, combined with external data and modern machine learning, can lead to smarter infrastructure spending without the need for expensive new hardware on every road.

"Every journey – to work, to school, to an appointment – depends on decisions someone made about a road or a bus route," Jordan said.

Diversity is built into how the company operates. Women make up about one-third of Alchera's team, its leadership and its board, a meaningful figure in a deep technology and transport sector where women remain significantly underrepresented, especially in technical and leadership roles.

The investors' case

Rafi Khan, investment manager at Maven Capital Partners, said: "Transport and infrastructure operators are sitting on vast amounts of data." The firm's thesis is that turning that data into actionable forecasts can unlock significant value for the public and private bodies that build and run transport networks.

The round also illustrates how the UK's public financial institutions are supporting early-stage technology companies. The British Business Bank's regional investment funds and Innovate UK's Investor Partnerships programme are designed to crowd in private capital for innovative firms outside London's traditional venture hubs.

Why better forecasts matter

Road and transport investment decisions are expensive and long-lived. A poorly timed lane closure on a motorway can ripple across a regional economy for weeks, delaying freight, commuters and emergency services. A bus priority scheme built on the wrong corridor can absorb millions of pounds while delivering little improvement in journey times. Yet many transport bodies still rely on traffic studies that take weeks to commission and are out of date soon after they are completed.

Forecasting tools that update continuously and can model scenarios in seconds change that calculus. Planners can test alternative roadworks schedules, compare investment options and explain their choices to politicians and the public with evidence rather than intuition. For authorities under pressure to do more with constrained budgets, that capability can translate directly into better value for taxpayers.

Maven itself has been active in the sector, having previously invested £15 million in Chorus Intelligence and £1.25 million in Zing, and its backing of Alchera through a regional fund reflects a broader push to support technology companies outside London.

A competitive and growing market

Alchera operates in the intelligent transportation systems market, which is expected to grow from about $42.6 billion in 2025 to roughly $55.4 billion by 2030, according to MarketsandMarkets. It faces competition from companies including VivaCity, which uses roadside AI sensors and has raised capital to expand in the United States; TransHumanity, a Loughborough University spin-out; and London-based GoodVision.

Alchera's differentiation lies in its focus on forecasting and decision support, combining many data sources rather than relying on a single type of sensor. That approach may appeal to authorities that want to make better use of existing data before committing to new physical infrastructure.

Plans for growth

The company has 15 employees and has made three hires since the round closed. It will use the new capital mainly for product development, with a focus on engineering and product, and to speed up deployments for customers. Alchera has not disclosed revenue, but says its customer base more than doubled over the past year.

Its targets are ambitious. Alchera aims to double its recurring customer base within 12 months and, within 36 months, to become a multi-million-pound annual recurring revenue business and the leading provider of evidence for decisions on transport infrastructure.

The opportunity extends well beyond Britain. Rapidly urbanising countries, including India, are investing heavily in highways, metro systems and bus networks, and face the same challenge of maximising the value of every rupee, pound or dollar spent on infrastructure. Tools that can forecast traffic and identify bottlenecks before they cause gridlock could prove valuable wherever governments are trying to build smarter, more efficient transport systems.

For Jordan and her team, the immediate task is to prove that AI-driven forecasting can become a standard part of how transport decisions are made, turning a successful deployment on Britain's busiest motorway into a model for networks everywhere.