The Nuremberg start-up Ci4Rail aims to revolutionize the transportation sector with intelligent computing solutions. The founders Mathias Beer, Klaus Popp, Bernd Härtlein and Manfred Schmitz are no strangers in the industry: all together they can look back on more than 80 years of experience in the embedded sector, especially in the railroad industry.
Digitalization based on latest technologies: when rail and public transport become the only alternatives
Passenger and freight transport is facing several challenges: Climate change, traffic density and population growth with simultaneously increasing mobility, to name a few. Although rail transport is best placed to address these problems sustainably and efficiently, its competitiveness with air and private transport is not yet effective in all mobility sectors.
The newly founded company Ci4Rail is dedicated to this potential and has no less an aim than to make rail and public transport an unrivalled alternative with intelligent cloud services and corresponding edge solutions.#
The vision: A world in which everyone likes to use public transport because it is faster, cheaper and more environmentally friendly than other forms of transport.
One factor that plays into the company’s cards in achieving this ambitious goal is the cumulative experience of its founders: Manfred Schmitz, founder of MEN Mikro Elektronik, Bernd Härtlein, most recently managing director of MEN, and two of its longest serving colleagues Mathias Beer and Klaus Popp have joined forces to launch the company. Together, they want to bring digital transformation with intelligent computing solutions to the railroad market and public transport and create revolutionary solutions in combination with their deep know-how in technology, innovation, safety-critical design and software.
Know Your Train – Product portfolio supporting predictive maintenance
On the product side, Ci4Rail will launch a holistic platform consisting of hardware, software and accompanying services – “Know Your Train”, short KYT. A holistic approach, also because with this concept Ci4Rail stands by its customers as a competent partner throughout the entire life cycle of the application, including the latest software, security patches, function updates, etc.
KYT consists of cloud services for device, application and user data management and a modular, flexible and scalable edge computer, which makes data from the vehicle and thus also the states of connected systems centrally accessible. In the spirit of open source, the open structure of the KYT platform allows adding new functions to constantly adapt to new use cases.
Based on latest technologies such as machine learning, the platform is primarily aimed at predictive maintenance applications, but can also be used for other value-added applications.
During the next weeks and months Ci4Rail wants to grow even more and is currently looking for new engineers for hardware and especially software development. Applications can be sent to Mathias Beer (hr@ci4rail.de).