59. Route Konnect

Founders: Mohamed Binesmael, Daniel Harborne, Matteo De Rosa
Year founded: 2018
Website: routekonnect.com

Some of the best ideas come about when you are stuck in traffic.

This is how the founders of Route Konnect – Mohamed Binesmael, Daniel Harborne, and Matteo De Rosa – identified a pressing issue: the inefficiency and unsustainability of travel in cities.

Frustrated by outdated sensors, manual traffic monitoring, and an overreliance on invasive data collection methods hindering urban progress (literally and figuratively), Cardiff-based Route Konnect created its software to champion urban change.

“Our cities are inefficient and unsustainable,” explain the founders. “The technologies they use are outdated, from sensors that haven’t changed since the 1970s, to manual counting of vehicles at junctions – yes, people in 2023 watching videos to count which way they go!”

Our cities are inefficient and unsustainable.

By using video analytics to provide an understanding of vehicle movement across spaces, and AI to automate previously manual processes, Route Konnect’s customers – traffic surveyors, local councils, and property developers – can improve the design of locations and optimise flows in real time, which helps save time, money, and the planet.

Like buses, Route Konnect’s achievements have come along all at once.

In addition to an impressive pre-seed funding round last year and grants from the Welsh Government and the UK Department for Transport, the company won Innovative Start-Up of the Year at the Start-Up Awards Wales, and was named one of the six finalists out of over 3,000 applicants in The Telegraph STEM Awards.

Route Konnect doubled its workforce in 2023 and it’s now gearing up to develop its next product: a solution aimed at replacing inductive loops in traffic light systems with its own junction mounted cameras. Our judges loved its potential to control phasing of traffic light systems, helping make junctions more efficient while simultaneously reducing C02 emissions.

Here at Startups, we think Route Konnect’s journey is just beginning.