Our objective at Future Planet Capital Regional is to positively impact the West Midlands region through enabling innovative business visions and helping to turn them into reality.
By helping to create successful businesses, we are supporting the region as a whole; with new investment, new jobs and new technologies generating further investment and revenue across the West Midlands.
You. Smart. Thing. (YST) secured £1.2 million in funding in a seed round led by Future Planet Capital Regional in 2024. We chatted to founder of the travel demand management business Chris Thompson, and FPC Regional’s Investment Director, Rupert Lyle, who is also Fund Principal of West Midlands Co-Investment Fund (WMCO), about why they think YST has been so successful.
What inspired the idea behind You. Smart. Thing. and why did it resonate with Future Planet Capital Regional?
Chris: Attending an event is an exciting thing, but the experience can be dampened if the logistics of getting there and back is difficult. I’ve heard so many stories over the years of people struggling when it came to travelling to major events, and always wondered why there wasn’t centralised, bespoke travel options created for these events. We saw the gap between transport and event technology and wanted to provide world-class visitor experiences through curated routing that improves operational delivery, event revenues and, ultimately, the visitor’s experience. We recognised that visitors’ experiences begin long before the opening act; how to get to the event – shuttle bus services, public transport timetables, getting to the right entrance – these can make or break an experience, particularly with someone unfamiliar with the host city.
Rupert: YST is redefining how people plan and experience travel to major events through the integration of ticketing, transport and emerging technologies, like Connected and Automated Mobility (CAM). Its CAM4EVENTS project, which is backed by Innovate UK and Zenzic, is designed to show how autonomous vehicle solutions can be linked to event travel planning, designing a scalable model for smarter, greener journeys that can be replicated nationwide following a regional pilot.
YST transforms event management by providing organisers with granular, real-time data on visitor travel patterns, enabling smarter decisions across security deployment, advertising placement, and last-mile transport coordination. The platform’s personalised travel plans create a continuous connection between venues and attendees, allowing organisations to track visitor movements throughout their journey and deliver automated, timely travel alerts that consistently achieve high engagement rates. This direct communication channel, built on the foundation of genuinely useful travel updates, opens significant commercial opportunities for event organisers to strategically promote contextually relevant products and services that enhance the overall visitor experience, all while building a more complete picture of audience behaviour that informs future event planning and operations.
Yes, a fantastic by-product of YST is the lowering of emissions from visitor travel. The environmental impact of events cannot be ignored, and through the utilisation of smart technologies and the unification of travel routes, we can help mitigate the carbon emissions typically associated with mass travel to and from major events.
YST’s first major event deployment was the Birmingham 2022 Commonwealth Games, where it processed more than 700,000 tailored spectator travel plans. In the past nine months, You. Smart. Thing. processed more than 15 million travel plans as more venues and cities have adopted the platform both in the UK and, more recently, overseas. This is a perfect example of creating something incredible in the Midlands region and scaling it globally.
How has the investment from Future Planet Capital Regional helped you expand and develop?
The investment from Future Planet Capital Regional helped us establish our global offer from within the UK. We’ve built out our sales and marketing, client development, product, software engineering teams; regionally, nationally and now globally thanks to the backing of Future Planet Capital Regional. Travel Demand Management (TDM) has traditionally been associated with large consulting services who would create a travel management plan for major events, then leave it to operational teams to figure out how to deliver it. With YST, an event’s overarching travel management plan can be easily implemented, linked to an individual’s ticket, configured to drive profitability through optimised people flow, and improve event safety whilst nudging people to make lower carbon travel choices. t.
The key impact of the investment was to accelerate the increasing blend of both event and transport technology; enabling more effective implementation of event travel management strategies – most importantly by engaging visitors with their own personalised low-carbon travel plan that includes all the information specific to the live event they’re planning to attend.
We saw substantial potential in the YST proposition and were keen to invest in a regional business with the capacity to shape major events across the region and, with the right backing, scale its service nationally and internationally.
Our expansion is moving internationally. We’ve secured deals stateside with a major US sports league and we have a small software engineering team based in Brisbane; ideal for the 2032 Olympics on the horizon. We’ve got a regular roster of international championships, concerts, festivals and major events lined up. There’s certainly exciting times ahead for us.
How does this investment support the West Midlands’ broader sustainability and transport innovation goals?
When it comes to the West Midlands, You. Smart. Thing. is a fantastic proposition, not only to its customer base, but also in looking to address environmental targets in the region itself. The West Midlands Combined Authority set out a vision to make the region net zero by 2041, and companies like YST are going to be crucial in achieving this ambitious goal. It complements the investment already made in greener buses, rail and cycling infrastructure by making sustainable travel easier and more accessible.
Working in partnership with a Combined Authority to facilitate integration and deeper collaboration with the region’s major venues and event spaces makes the delivery of our services more impactful in environmental and socio-economic terms. This model works particularly well when the local authority has revenue responsibility for public transport, as there is a direct impact on revenue generated from recommended routes that promote use of public transport, including integration with other modes of transport such as bike, scooter hire or park and ride, often creating options that people wouldn’t otherwise choose.
We’re working with Transport for West Midlands to look at tactical deployments of You. Smart. Thing that can improve regional accessibility and the West Midlands’ proposition as a host destination for future global events.
For businesses who would like to explore investment opportunities with Future Planet Capital Regional can visit the Pitch for Investment page, or get in touch with the team to find out more.