TfL Joins Forces With Tech City Ventures Nitrous Programme To Embrace Startup Innovation

Transport for London (TfL) has joined forces with Tech City Ventures to create an innovation programme to find new ways to keep London moving.

As part of Tech City Ventures’ Nitrous programme, which initiates collaboration between startups and local government, six UK and international startups will work alongside transport experts to in the innovation programme.

Tech and London transport

The startups, which were selected from hundreds of similar companies applying to take part in the three month programme, will now work with TfL to find way to reduce congestion on public transport network and the capital’s roads, and find ways to reduce pollution in a city that has a reputation for rather unclean air in comparison to other British cities.

The programme will facilitate the use of open data from both the government and the transport industry, with the goal of providing startups with the means to come up with more public sector innovation without the need for additional funding.

It will also provide access to technology and transportation experts from private sector companies such as IBM, Vodafone and Aston martin.

“As London grows and changes, we are continually looking for new ways to help our customers and extract better value from our open-data feed. I look forward to seeing the innovation and ideas that these startups generate and develop throughout this exciting initiative,” said Stuart Reid, director of Travel Demand Management at TfL.

The six startup involved in the programme are computer vision and machine learning specialist Alchera Technologies,  cycling navigator startup Blubel, Faxi, the smartphone app and technology platform to encourage ridesharing, artificial intelligence software developer NumberEight, on demand bicycle firm Pedals, and TravelAi, a specialist in providing insightful information from analysing crowdsourced data on travel behaviour.

With insightful information key to the  future of smart cites and companies like Nvidia providing AI platforms for analysing smart city data, it is no wonder TfL is keen to work with startups to help it evolve and adopt the latest technology.

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