Accelerate your business in 3 months
Design, develop and pitch your MVP to win a contract of work with Transport for Wales… in 3 months. Join our innovation accelerator programme and scaleup your business.
2026 Transport for Wales Challenge Statement
1. Safety and Sustainability
• New Sustainability Initiatives.
• Active travel monitoring through low.no maintenance solutions.
• Improving the safety of colleagues and customers.
2. Robotics, Quantum and 3D Printing
• 3D printing of infrastructure e.g. Harrington humps, platforms.
• Tree/debris clearance and route maintenance.
• Improving rail and bus performance.
3. Customer Experience
• Text to speech and speech to text / voice searching in Welsh.
• Future of pay as you go ticketing where journeys are automatically recorded.
• Bus and active travel initiatives to increase usage.
4. Wildcard: Future of transport - Ensuring TfW is Future Ready
• The wildcard submission is for technology of the future which does not fit under the specified challenge areas above.
Please note: You will be expected to attend one full day a week at our innovation lab located in Pontypridd.
How we help your start-up | |||
| We accelerate tech start-ups with our 10-week accelerator programme, in partnership with Transport for Wales, by delivering innovation workshops, mentoring and training covering | |||
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Market | Customer | Value | Prototyping |
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Validation | Developing a minimal | Demo |
| Learn more |
Our previous cohorts | |||
| Find out more about our alumni and their success. | |||
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Start ups applied for our cohorts | Start ups shortlisted | Start ups worked with | Start ups taken to business case review |
Want to follow in their footsteps? |
| Apply here |
Our latest demo day |
| Watch the video from our latest demo day |
Why participate? |
| If you have a product or service that can benefit Transport for Wales processes, or improve passenger experience, we’d love to hear from you. |
| Participants will collaborate with mentors across the innovation sector and Transport for Wales. This expertise will help your start up refine and develop a product fit-for-purpose for the rail industry, and then make a pitch to decision makers from Transport for Wales. |
| Successful pitches will be awarded a contract of work, to fund the remainder of the project and produce a product or service that has real world impact across Transport for Wales. |
Benefits of our programme | |
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Mentoring from industry experts | Collaboration with TfW and partners |
| Guidance, mentoring and coaching from innovation delivery experts and decision makers. | Access to live data, customer feedback and testing,TfW stakeholders and funding partners. |
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Business growth | Collaboration |
| The opportunity to win a contract of work and receive funding to launch your product across TfW | Work with us throughout weekly workshops, coaching you from ideation to pitch. |
Our partners |
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| View partners |
Why work with TfW? |
| Be part of a multi-billion pound, growing industry, with a wealth of investment opportunities for innovative projects. Develop technology and innovative solutions that will improve the passenger experience for millions of people and make a real, lasting improvement across Wales. |
| Showcase your product and business to the wider network of partners and stakeholders associated with Transport for Wales. Be part of an industry that will give your start-up the opportunities to be innovative, to grow and to be successful. |
| Apply here |
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Connect with us on social media |
