Founded in 2017 by Rui Sales and Ricardo Margalho, Stratio works to achieve "a future without forced stops, in which everyone has access to a reliable mode of transportation that connects them to jobs, places of education, hospitals and their loved ones".
After all, argues Rui Sales, better quality public transport is not just a tool for mobility, but can also be a tool for social equity: "Quality, reliable public transport ensures that those who don't have a personal vehicle are not excluded from services and opportunities," he argues. The starting point for the project was the realization that the "public transport industry operated with little visibility and monitoring, which made it prone to disruption.
This resulted in vehicle breakdowns and service problems that, over time, damaged passenger confidence," explains Stratio's leader. Along the way, Rui Sales adds, environmental awareness also weighed in: "The climate crisis gave us an even greater sense of urgency, since it has never been more critical to encourage people to opt for shared mobility instead of their private cars." To get there, Stratio guarantees to take advantage of a "proprietary technology that allows total visibility of a vehicle's condition, transforming what used to be guesswork into a source of operational intelligence," says the company's president.
"We are able to accurately predict when a vehicle's brake pads will need to be replaced. This increases vehicle safety, but also allows the maintenance team to avoid over-maintaining the vehicle, to know when parts need to be ordered, and to schedule maintenance for off-peak periods, where there is no impact on service," he says. With its sights set on a goal no less ambitious than its founding purpose - "to be present in as many commercial vehicles as possible out of the 335 million currently on the roads" - for Stratio, there is no doubt that the path to the future lies in artificial intelligence.
Priding itself on having "a unique technology in the world", Stratio's predictive maintenance platform "collects and analyses data from vehicles of any make, which means that a transport provider can scale the solution according to the size of its fleet and acquire complete, real-time visibility into the condition of each bus, regardless of make, model or age," explains the company's president.
Which, he adds, becomes an open door to the world: "This ensures that our solution can serve transport operators of any size, anywhere. Some of our customers are local transport operators in Portugal, but this is still a smaller market for us," he admits.
With a platform based on "billions of vehicle data points that are transmitted and analysed in real time, which requires a huge amount of bandwidth", Stratio also praises Altice's contribution. "It was the first technology partner to support what we were creating," acknowledges the company's president.