A pretty nugget has chosen the Val-de-Marne and the small Urbain Pro activity park in Valenton to flourish since January: Altaroad.
This start-up provides a solution that is particularly popular with construction industry players: tracing construction trucks transporting materials, monitoring their backfill, assessing their overloads or underloads ... Enough to act on the environment, illegal dumps, optimization journeys, recovery of excavated material, etc.
It is also developing a project to prevent overloaded trucks from getting onto bridges, at the risk of weakening them or even, an extremely rare disaster scenario, of leading to their collapse as was the case in Haute-Garonne in November 2019. A burden heavy weighing nearly 50 t was engaged on an engineering structure with a maximum capacity of 19 t.
Result: two deaths.
"These are the customers who come to pick us up"
Altaroad was born in 2017 in the laboratories of the École Polytechnique (Essonne).
The young shoot was created by three women with well-made heads: X, Telecom, HEC ... After starting with four people, it now employs about fifteen employees, attracts renowned clients (Eiffage, Coteg of the Fayat group, Vinci construction, Lafarge, etc.) and won the 2020 competition from the European Innovation Council specializing in the environment, with a prize of € 5 million in grants and equity.
Altaroad sensors entering and leaving the site are these two bands placed on the ground, very compact.
DR
"It is the customers who come to pick us up because we are meeting a need," explains Cécile Villette, CEO and co-founder of Altaroad.
When they carry out a construction site on a site that is constrained, for example, it is impossible to deploy the weighbridges, these large scales of thirty meters in length usually used to weigh the loads of the trucks.
We, on the other hand, can install our sensors there: two strips arranged in a thin carpet placed on the road.
This very flexible solution makes it possible to weigh heavy goods vehicles entering and leaving the site, to be sure that they are not overloaded (by estimating a load with the naked eye, several tonnes could be wrong!) , to avoid underloaded trucks and therefore more heavy goods vehicles on our roads.
"
Used on the site of the future Noisy-Champs station
The device is used on the work of the Grand Paris Express for the future Noisy-Champs station (line 15).
The manager appreciates "the small footprint which frees up space on the site while minimizing the implementation time", as well as the "easy and regular monitoring of the excavated material, namely between 2,000 and 3,000 tonnes per day. ".
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Far from being simply a space-saving scale, Altaroad has also created a platform with artificial intelligence to detect the license plate, measure the speed of the vehicle, follow the route, the fate of the materials transported.
"All of this contributes to the circular economy, to the fight against illegal dumping, to the optimization of flows".
Valenton, January 6.
The young shoot chose the Urbain Pro business park in Valenton, won over by its service, its prices and its security.
LP / Marine Legrand
The start-up has until now been hosted in the capital within the Paris & Co incubator and its Sustainable City center.
“But we needed to expand, to store more equipment, to support our international growth,” explains Cécile Villette.
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A real estate agent offered them this room in Valenton, where an entrepreneur has just created a small business park ideally arranged and located: Urbain Pro, rue Aminata-Traoré.
What attracted Altaroad?
She was able to unearth 120 new m2 there at very affordable rent, proximity to the motorway and in a “reassuring” secure enclosure.
According to a local economic observer, "the arrival of the start-up is further proof that small business premises can accommodate technological nuggets", appreciates a local economic observer.
