Meet KONUX – an AI scaleup from Germany, transforming railway operations for a sustainable future. Founded in 2014, the scale-up combines machine learning and industrial IoT to transform railways. KONUX is a member of the EIC Scaling Club in the Smart Mobility Group. 

Since its foundation, KONUX has raised over $130 million from world-leading investors, expanded to multiple European and Asian countries, and was selected by the World Economic Forum as one of the world’s 30 most innovative scale-ups. Since day one, KONUX has been on a mission to make railway the mobility choice of tomorrow by increasing capacity, reliability, and cost efficiency.

Upon founding the startup, KONUX creators shared a common goal, which the team still shares – leveraging cutting-edge technology to address the challenges of the railway industry. Petra Pavlovic, Senior Product Marketing Manager, told us: 

Our founders strongly believed that the survival of this business and its success would hinge on a singular vision, specifically – railway. We still focus on railway today because we believe it's society-critical. The industry is tightly regulated, counter-cyclical, and has extremely high barriers to entry. And it is still in desperate need of digitalization. 

Bringing next-gen technologies into railway maintenance 

The railway industry is stuck in an unsustainable status quo, while demand for it is growing and expected to double by 2050. Without significant transformation, the existing railway infrastructure is heading towards collapse. That's where KONUX comes in, bringing next-generation predictive maintenance and network usage traffic monitoring and finding solutions for railway infrastructure management. 

KONUX offers two solutions – KONUX Switch and KONUX Traffic. KONUX Switch is a quantum product that provides end-to-end predictive maintenance. Using IoT devices and AI, it gathers data, provides complex insights into the state of the railway infrastructure, and enables data-backed decision-making regarding infrastructure maintenance. 

KONUX Traffic is a tool for managing train schedules and improving on-time performance. It uses train movement data and advanced algorithms to find where and why delays happen so operators can fix them. It also helps create better timetables by finding patterns of unused capacity. If there is a disruption, it provides advice on the best way to recover quickly and minimize the impact on the entire network.

Innovation as KONUX's competitive edge

The KONUX team admits that operating in a tightly regulated industry like railway poses plenty of challenges to the scale-up's growth. Yet, the German company manages to expand and land new deals. 

One way of doing that is by competing for governmental tenders. The competition is often fierce – well-established industry players with large portfolios. However, KONUX plays the game by bringing something the big players don't really have, and that's innovation. The German company was the first startup to win a European tender with Deutsche Bahn, the largest infrastructure manager in Europe. In 2024, the scale-up won another tender, which served as a crucial catalyst for KONUX's growth.

When asked about the decision to participate in the EIC Scaling Club, KONUX says that it was a logical step for the scale-up. By being part of the Club, KONUX hopes to have more access to governmental bodies and lobbyists in the European Parliament who support the scale-up's vision of railway infrastructure transformation. Petra Pavlovic points out:

It's one thing to have an agenda in Germany, France, or Spain, but we need a European agenda to make railway the number one mobility choice across Europe. Railway is an incredibly sustainable mode of transport. Improving networks, running more trains, and running them more efficiently so people can rely on railways across Europe should be part of the European agenda.

About the EIC Scaling Club

The EIC Scaling Club is a curated community where 120+ European deep tech scale-ups with the potential to build world-class businesses and solve major global challenges come together with investors, corporate innovators and other industry stakeholders to spur growth.

The top 120+ European deep tech companies will be carefully selected from a pool of high-growth scale-ups that have benefitted from EIC financial schemes, other European and national innovation programmes, and beyond.

The EIC Scaling Club is an EIC-funded initiative run in partnership by Tech Tour, Bpifrance (EuroQuity), Hello Tomorrow, Tech.eu (Webrazzi), EurA and IESE Business School.

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