Midway through our interview, tech specialist Anna Jordan mentions her love of upholstery and turns her camera around to show off her latest purchase: a weatherbeaten chaise longue bought online for £25 and in the process of being repaired.

It was certainly an unexpected segway from discussing her recent career developing digital transport systems, but one that perfectly sums up her approach to life as an innovation entrepreneur.

“We have a responsibility to use things already created, and to use them well,” says Anna, who goes on to explain that roads can also be improved with careful attention – by using digital systems. Companies delivering transport solutions must also use resources wisely, she adds, as they are “stewards of society, and stewards of the planet.”

Anna is Chief Executive of Alchera Technologies, an SME supported by Connected Places Catapult on several accelerator programmes. When not renovating furniture, her main focus is developing intelligent systems to help vehicles flow more easily through motorway roadworks, prioritise buses at busy junctions and improve highway connections for people in rural areas.

“Transport is crucial to society, but despite all the money spent we still have inefficiencies such as with congestion and delayed buses,” she points out. “If inefficiencies are part of the status quo, there's clearly room for improvement.”

Honing her practical skills

Anna was born in Hounslow, and relocated when she was very young with her family to America; first to Texas and then to a suburb of Atlanta, Georgia. She remembers sitting in the cul-de-sac outside her house with friends drawing on the street with chalk. “There was a great sense of community and of place; spending quality time with people is something that resonates from way back,” she reflects.

The family later returned to London to be nearer her grandparents in a village south of the capital. “I was always interested in building and making stuff. My grandma taught me sewing and upholstery, and my grandpa was an Army engineer. They had a workshop in their back garden and we used to build stools, chairs and birdhouses out of wood and nails.”

At school, Anna excelled at maths and science but regrets not placing as much value on creative subjects such as art. “I wanted to be an architect, but rather than spend an extra year doing an art foundation programme, I decided to study engineering instead as I thought I would still get to influence the environment.”

In preparation to apply for university, she spent a week of work experience in an engineers’ office, making manual calculations for cantilevered beams used in construction. “I was given a pencil and a sheet of paper and had to write the calculations out very neatly.” But on the last afternoon, she was told there was actually software that could make those calculations in five minutes. “I was furious. I hate inefficiency and wasting time; we should use the tools at our behest to make decisions. That put me off engineering, so I studied physics instead.”

Anna enrolled at Imperial College London, and spent year three of her Masters course at a university in Grenoble, France as part of the Erasmus programme that gave students international experience.

She specialised in graphene physics and quantum, and joined a research group led by her course supervisor. Anna worked as a PhD student for a year and toyed with the idea of “exploring my intellectual curiosity a little longer” but realised it wasn't for her. She returned to the UK in 2017 and picked up a pub job while exploring avenues to pursue next.

Identifying new opportunities

But she was looking for more. “Machine learning was becoming big news and I wanted to be part of it, so I networked with AI professionals and was open to where opportunities might land.”

She joined venture builder Cambridge Applied Research as a software engineer, working with a handful of start-ups including Alchera Technologies. She met co-founders Emil Hewage and Joned Sarwar and was encouraged to join them as head of operations to help the company understand how data could better be used to inform decision making in the built environment, and to scale the business.

She wasn’t the strongest at coding, “but could see every roadblock we were about to run into,” brought in new people and identified systems it needed to develop. Early products included computer vision software to better understand how vehicles move through traffic junctions, and Anna realised that future solutions were more likely to be software-based, rather than hardware.

Alchera started working with roads teams in Oxfordshire and Lancashire county councils, and later National Highways – for whom it trialled traffic prediction software on the M6 (with Costain) as part of an accelerator run by the Catapult to improve customer experiences through roadworks.

The company also took part in the Transport Research and Innovation Grants programme – delivered by the Catapult on behalf of the Department for Transport – to better understand how buses could be prioritised through busy junctions. More recently, it has taken part in the Rural Transport Accelerator to help improve connectivity for communities in Norfolk.

Today, the company provides an AI technology engine that powers products such as ‘Alchera Data Hub’ for monitoring and evaluating traffic dynamics; ‘Alchera Bus’ to deliver improved bus services; and ‘Alchera Highways’ better understand how a network performs.

“With mobility and transport, it is important to have shared ways of thinking,” Anna says. “Connected Places Catapult has opened the door for us to speak to the right contacts, shined a light on us as a business to make us visible to the market, and given us space to trial blue sky thinking.”

In addition to the day job, Anna has also been contributing to a transport AI strategy for Government, as part of the ‘BridgeAI’ working group from Innovate UK to encourage the adoption of artificial intelligence.

“Data is a public good, helps power many industries and is effectively another utility service. We still under-invest in what that means for transport. But I also feel lucky to be developing new systems, and to drive along roads that we've been a part of improving.”

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