The Transport for Wales Accelerator – A Brilliant Initiative

Things have been moving quite quickly here at JNCTION, our DST has gone live with LNER, we’re in the second phase of the Mayor of London Covid Safe Travel Challenge, and we’ve been involved in the Transport for Wales Accelerator, in partnership with Alt Labs.

Over a week has passed since we finished the 10-week long accelerator and we wanted to provide a brief insight as to how we found the accelerator, what we learnt, what we developed and finally, what we hope to do, now that it has finished. 

The accelerator kicked off with a presentation from Alt Labs, Barry Lloyd (Head of Customer Experience and Innovation, TfW) and Cerian Houston-Jones (Head of Customer Experience, TfW). The cohort learnt about TfW, its goals and the key purpose of the accelerator. This overview was rich with data and insight that provided a benchmark for the next 10-weeks.

For the next coming, Alt Labs and TfW would hold workshops, networking conversations with industry people, brainstorms, planning meetings, and 1-2-1’s so that the cohort members could sharpen their product narratives.

In the last few weeks, our development team were busy building a minimum viable product (MVP) while the commercial team were preparing to pitch to the TfW stakeholders. 

On demo day, we pitched Aubin for the Cohort 3 Demo Day amongst six other startups offering innovative technologies like ours. We received invaluable and very positive feedback and we’re looking forward to continuously developing Aubin as the Accelerator has only taught us that it is a highly sought-after solution.

The whole experience has certainly been fulfilling and informative and has opened our eyes to what we can do with Aubin. Everyone we have spoken to has offered their support and expertise in helping us plan how we can make Aubin better for the Welsh public. 

These last ten weeks have proved that Aubin can be adapted to other environments and TOCs. For now, we will continue to develop the Aubin platform and carry out more research. We look forward to working on Aubin with Transport for Wales to create a solution that’ll make travel easier and safer for many passengers in Wales. 

Thank you to Adam Stead (Senior IT Project Manager (Mobility-as-a-Service), TfW), Cerian Houston-Jones, Michael Davies (Innovation and Insight Manager, TfW) and everyone at Alt Labs and Transport for Wales for your expertise and time. We have enjoyed the whole experience of the Transport for Wales accelerator.