Konux, a Munch-based deep tech AI scale-up, has been building out a SaaS business powered by proprietary sensing hardware and AI that drives a predictive maintenance software-as-a-service(SaaS) play which is upgrading railway infrastructure as reported by Techcrunch.
Its mission is to drive digitization and transformative change atop rail travel, using AI plus IoT to add intelligence to fixed rails by capturing real-time data on what’s happening on and to the railway network.
“The core problem is something that actually is a dirty problem,” says Konux CEO Adam Bonnifield as told to Techcrunch, discussing what makes this AI business different from the ones hogging most of the global limelight right now.
“It’s not one of these clean, AI model-building totally digital problems. It’s the dirty problem of getting sensors to survive the environment, extracting the data, making sense of it, fitting it within the business problems, with the customer, and then bringing along the organisation on a journey through a bunch of organisational changes.
The company is using deep tech methods and stress-tested connected hardware to gain visibility into the loads and forces railway lines are accommodating day in, and day out; measuring vibration through the tracks to pick up anomalies that may signify failures incoming, then presenting its probabilistic analysis of what’s going to happen to the infrastructure over the next few months.
Its AI-driven predictions were developed to a 90% accuracy standard, per Bonnifield.
The idea is to leverage AI and IoT to power data-driven decisions that can drive optimization around other aspects of rail operation, expanding out from Konux’s first focus on tracking infrastructure stress at key points on the network.
