AlphaRoute grew out of a school-bus routing challenge in Boston. When Boston Public Schools faced a multimillion-dollar budget gap, COO John Hanlon invited the city to propose new approaches. MIT professor Dimitris Bertsimas led a graduate-student team whose algorithms cut 50 buses from the district’s fleet and saved $5 million. Hanlon and Bertsimas later joined researchers and public-sector leaders to launch AlphaRoute. 2
Based in Waltham, Massachusetts, AlphaRoute develops transportation-management software, analytics and consulting services for school districts and transit agencies. Its stated reach is international, while its LinkedIn profile describes it as an MIT-based startup serving agencies nationwide. 123 The company’s leadership includes co-founder and CEO John Hanlon and founder Dimitris Bertsimas; Diogo Lousa and Mohammad Ghane are also listed as co-founders. 2
Its work spans school-bus routing and transit operations, including scheduled and on-demand services, paratransit, microtransit, and shuttle systems for universities and companies. The platform is designed to help agencies model routes, weigh cost and coverage trade-offs, and re-optimize services; AlphaRoute says its transit tools can generate revised solutions for large systems in minutes. 712 A notable school-district project is its collaboration with Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools (CMS), for which it developed AlphaPortal, a parent-facing application for routing information and requests, alongside AlphaPlan routing software and AlphaCom communications tools. 11