In the landscape of the rail industry, innovative start-ups have been instrumental in driving digital transformation and shaping the future of transportation. Among these, KONUX has been transforming the way railway assets are monitored and maintained. This article explores the journey of KONUX, from its early days as a start-up to its current position as a mature scale-up, making significant strides in the rail industry.

Singular vision

KONUX was founded in 2014 by four students: Andreas Loy (Kunze), Vlad Lata, Max Hasler and Dennis Humhal. The founding team shared a common goal – to leverage cutting-edge technology to address the challenges faced by the rail industry. With a focus on artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning, and the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT), they aimed to enhance the reliability, safety, and efficiency of railway operations. KONUX took a singular industry vision at a time when AI and IIoT start-ups were intent on addressing multiple industries at once for greater scalability. The four founders strongly believed that survival, growth and even success hinged on holding a singular vision.

By choosing rail, KONUX focused on an industry that is society-critical, tightly regulated and counter-cyclical with high barriers to entry that was (and still is) in desperate need of digitalisation. A clear mission for the business emerged: to enable the digitalization of the rail industry with AI-driven data analytics and IIoT. With a focus on delivering tangible value and addressing critical pain points faced by rail operators, KONUX quickly gained recognition as a promising start-up within the industry.

KONUX also stood out because of our drive to transform railway operations and because we introduced a new category of products – a SaaS-driven predictive maintenance solution in an industry historically dominated by hardware-centric suppliers. Predictive maintenance had not sustainably reached railway yet and KONUX began working to change that.

Trial and error

In mid-2016 KONUX won a trial to install the first iteration of its IIoT device in the field and begin to gather data for the KONUX system from passing trains. Building this required a very specific mix of people – physicists, data scientists, software engineers, hardware specialists, and experts with deep railway knowledge. None of what KONUX set out to do would have been possible without this combination. What made the team unique was both its technical capability and the fact that these specialists were willing to take their expertise into the field, standing trackside to understand real forces, behaviours, and constraints. This blend of physics and AI, grounded in practical rail experience, became one of KONUX’s defining strengths.

The first use case for KONUX Switch was continuous trackbed health monitoring and prediction. Understanding the trackbed degradation provided the necessary lead time for planning and execution of track maintenance tasks such as tamping. This trial served as proof of concept (PoC) for KONUX Switch and in order to further prove product-market fit, KONUX worked extremely closely with the customer, to truly understand how they would use the solution and how valuable it was to them. Through this closeness, additional use cases emerged addressing the health conditions of other asset components, understanding the impact of different traffic on the infrastructure, understanding the impact of load, speed and even traffic composition.

Scale or fail

2018 was a milestone year for KONUX as the company proved that it could deliver at scale. Rail is a safety-focused industry and proving reliability to the industry was the key to success. The robustness, safety and quality of the KONUX Switch IIoT device was further proven when it passed the Deutsche Bahn ice shooting test – it remained fully fixed to the sleeper after being hit three times by a 4kg ice block shot with a speed of 290 km/h.

Most start-ups in rail fail exactly at this point – they get caught up in a pilot (trial) loop and never find the path to large-scale commercialisation. These cycles can take years, not months. Long-term processes define the industry, and only companies that can stay committed throughout them build long-term relationships with customers. For a start-up, this endurance is often the difference between survival and collapse. KONUX learned early that succeeding in rail meant being structurally prepared for long timelines, not short bursts of activity.

Succeeding in the rail industry is not only about proving reliability at scale, the robustness of hardware and the business cases but it is also about convincing a customer that you are the right partner for their digitalisation journey. It also required pushing for updates to long-established maintenance rulebooks and helping customers adapt their thinking from time-based maintenance to predictive, condition-based approaches. Integrating a modern AI-enabled system with decades-old legacy infrastructure demanded a mindset shift across both technical and operational teams.

Piloting commercial success

Measuring data is one thing, but extracting actionable insights from that data is where a significant portion of the value of AI start-ups and scale-ups lies. Through pilots (trials), KONUX’s actionable insights and large-scale analysis were proven. As a result, the first real commercial proof came in the form of winning the first public tender with DB Netz (the infrastructure arm of Deutsche Bahn) in 2020 in the middle of a pandemic.

KONUX was the first start-up to ever win a public tender with DB. Notably, prior to this, the winning of public tenders was reserved for large incumbents. It was major proof for both KONUX in that it proved that it could do what it set out to (and more) and for DB that their strategy to engage with start-ups through DB Mindbox worked beyond a PoC.

Growing global

KONUX quickly established partnerships in a number of countries including Belgium, Spain, Italy and the United Kingdom. Having one major win with the biggest rail company in Europe, DB, helped to open up doors around the globe. It made internationalization possible at a very high speed, but this came with new challenges.

As standardised as the market might seem, making KONUX’s solution work for various markets, environments and infrastructure, for example, wooden sleepers and slow traffic, took additional engineering effort. The stakes are high in railway because the system operates with very little tolerance for error. Overall we had to balance the demand for hypergrowth while meeting the expectations of a highly regulated, safety-focused customer base. But, the benefits for customers were clear: improved safety through early detection of failures, significant cost savings through optimised maintenance, and strengthened reputation by reducing service disruptions and delivering more reliable performance.

The next crossing

Today, 2025, is marked with some of the most significant milestones. KONUX has reached 500 million train traces across the globe and has also provided numerous insights that have been acted upon by customers. We stand as a mature scale-up, with a diverse team of over 100 people, spanning multiple disciplines from data science and integration to customer success and solutions engineering. KONUX’s impact on the industry has also been acknowledged by major railway operators and led to partnerships with renowned companies such as Deutsche Bahn, ADIF, Network Rail and Infrabel.

To scale to this point and beyond means building an organisation that can deliver, understanding and curating the user journey, and going beyond the first product. Essentially this time at KONUX is characterised by another careful balance between learning to scale and replicating success. With KONUX CoBrix, our modular Data & AI Platform, we’re laying the foundation for a more collaborative and interoperable rail landscape. KONUX CoBrix enables secure, federated data environments, breaks down silos, and brings together network usage, infrastructure condition and operational insights. We are continuing to leverage AI and large-scale data integration, to give visibility around entire networks, managing performance, capacity, delays and infrastructure. Looking ahead, KONUX remains committed to driving innovation and advancing the rail industry’s digital transformation with new solutions.