We are excited to announce the investment by the Jenson SEIS and EIS Fund 4 into QRoutes Limited.
QRoutes is a low-cost, cloud-based tool for planning home-to-school transport for students with Special Educational Needs and Disabilities (SEND).
The cost to Local Authorities of providing this transport has trebled since the year 2000, and is now over £600m per year. SEND transport is disproportionally more expensive than mainstream school transport because students need to be picked up from or near to home. It takes time to plan routes which minimise the number of vehicles required and therefore the cost. But students join and leave schools and plans rapidly become inefficient.
Automated routing solutions have been offered by suppliers as part of larger resource planning and management systems for the last 30 years. But they are expensive, time-consuming to procure and install, difficult to use and don’t produce as results as good as those from human planners.
In comparison QRoutes is:
• Simple – planners can assess the dedicated tool they need online in.
• Easy – it has an intuitive map based interfaces.
• Fast – a school can be planned in minutes not weeks.
• Efficient – routes are more cost effective than those from planners alone.
David Stewart is co-founder and CEO. He has a Maths PhD and MBA with 15 years of senior management experience in high technology organisations across several industries. He has consulted at Sky, Virgin and Airbus, been CEO at RiskAware (securing a £5m contract) and CEO at Esoterix (securing £1m of grants). In 2015 he identified and secured grant funding with which to start QRoutes.
Jeff Duffell, co-founder and Director of Business Development, has sold passenger logistics software to councils for 30 years. He founded Mobisoft UK in 2000 and sold it to Canadian company DDS Wireless in 2007, being retained to act as UK Operations Director. In 2013 he left DDS to work directly with local authorities on new expert software services and this led to the formation of QRoutes.
David commented: “We’ve always known the huge market potential for QRoutes and are delighted the Jenson Fund has recognised the impact we are having. Their investment will accelerate our growth and allow us to fully realise that potential more quickly.”
