STRATIO is a Portuguese company with headquarters in Coimbra founded in 2013. Its focus is on data analysis and research & development of IoT solutions for the transportation industry, in the areas of travel assistance and mobile & digital ticketing. With the support of Instituto Pedro Nunes (IPN) they are now one of the top FI-Impact solutions for 2016. 

The solution:

As most cities lacked real-time, accessible information on their public transport services and rely on legacy ticketing solutions still using paper and/or plastic cards, STRATIO has developed ROTAS.

This product – not the first from STRATIO’s portfolio – was developed with the help of the frontierCities project, an EU funded project which supports SMEs and startups to develop Smart Mobility applications for cities across Europe with the help of FIWARE technology.

ROTAS web application 

Through this project, they have brought ROTAS to life aiming to use the data already available in cities to automatically create standardised General Transit Feed Specification (GTFS), thus enabling real-time travel assistance apps to be easily deployed city by city. This mobile app adapts to any city! ROTAS is easily configurable to each city and provides real-time information on any mobility request from any point A to point B within that city’s limits.

It also introduces digital ticketing. Transport operators can allow ROTAS to integrate ticketing purchase and validation, making it possible for users to rely only on their smartphone for their daily trips. These features have actually proved to boost the usage of public transportation by tourists, as interfaces, experience and navigation are similar from city to city.

ROTAS API for 3rd-party applications, allow any company with transportation apps to easily implement the ticketing and validation functionalities within their applications, allowing STRATIO’s service to rapidly reach critical mass.

The STRATIO team

"The Support Of IPN Was Critical for STRATIO"

The history of this growing company started early. “We were lucky enough to start our operations in a city – Coimbra – known by its University and its links between the academic and the entrepreneurial world”, says Ricardo Margalho CEO and Co-founder of STRATIO. In Coimbra, IPN - Instituto Pedro Nunes, is an incubator, accelerator and research facility created by the local University and has been growing since 1991. In 2010 they have been awarded the prize for Best Science Based Incubator in Europe. They have been a certified EU|BIC since May 2011.  

Ricardo says that the firsts step as a company was “to submit an application for IPN’s incubation programme, and start working with experienced people who could provide us key advice in areas such as recruitment, product development and business strategy”.

“The support from IPN was critical for STRATIO to set out ROTAS business and internationalisation strategy”, adds Ricardo. “It created the opportunity to network with investors leading to successful seed funding by the frontierCities grant, and the commercial release of ROTAS in 2016”.

For its innovative use of FIWARE, ROTAS was selected by FI-IMPACT as a high potential European initiative. The combined IoT expertise of IPN’s applied R&D Labs and this company, will soon be pave the way towards ticketless navigation relying on smartphone location based services.  

STRATIO has received support from both IPN and EBN directly during the development of the ROTAS project. It has also received support from FI-Business, which allowed them to receive key insights from business mentors on how to adapt their product to customers’ needs.

EBN participation in the frontierCities project between 2014 and 2016 was managed by Chiara Davalli. She also played a very important role in ROTA’s success connecting STRATIO with European cities and decision makers, creating business opportunities for this smart mobility company.