HEBRON, Ky. — It’s one small step for man, but one fast leap for mankind.
Tucked away in an industrial warehouse near Cincinnati & Northern Kentucky International Airport is Beltways, a startup with a bold vision for the future of pedestrian mobility.
Their product is an accelerating, fast-moving walkway. It’s an upgrade to the kind you might see at the airport.
John and Matine Yuksel co-founded the company in 2020, reviving an idea from their father to create an efficient mass mobility system for pedestrians.
The end result, Matine explained, is a modular system that connects to form a walkway of any length. As opposed to traditional moving walkways, each module contains its own belt. That allows for each section to gradually accelerate the passenger.
“We're going to hit around five miles an hour for those [airport walkways] but when you think about tram replacement, we can top out at 10 miles an hour, which is the industry maximum,” John said.
When factoring in wait times for a tram, he said Beltways will have the same throughput.
“So we can be 20-times cheaper than a tram system with the same amount of throughput, that’s the game changer,” he said.
The co-founders started the company in Silicon Valley. After a stint in Iowa, they arrived in the Tri-State.
“It just made a lot more sense to be in this region for a number of factors,” he said, listing needs for capital, hardware and a large industrial cluster. “The cost of facilities like this is dramatically more cost-effective than the coast.”
That’s a reality that inspires Main Street Ventures. The nonprofit is working to expand entrepreneurship in the region by providing capital, connections and education.
Director of Engagement Abby Ober said the region is a “booming ecosystem” with access to talent and resources.
“Once we get them here, they usually don’t leave,” Ober said, while highlighting the biggest need for small businesses and startups: access to capital. “That’s one thing we’re really proud … to be able to do with no strings attached. It’s a grant.”
The organization has provided $4 million in grants to roughly 170 companies since 2018.
Last year, Main Street Ventures provided one to Beltways for over $26,000 to help them scale their business.
“They’re able to use that funding to kind of take them to that next iteration,” Ober said.
Matine said it allowed them to develop a third prototype to simulate passenger load for performance: “It was instrumental to our development in the company.”
Currently, Beltways is working with its fourth prototype, which John jokes is “the world’s smallest walkway.”
Though tiny, it holds many of the features its first prototype did not: chest-high guardrails, LED lights, and access for mobility devices. It’s also wider.
“The hard engineering part was really all that you see right here, and it's just a copy paste of that to make it longer,” John said.
Beltways said they are in talks with CVG and other airports to deploy the technology.
Though airports are their first targets (they’re indoors and a familiar environment for users), the brothers have a vision for walkways in cities throughout the world.
“We go where the masses gather,” Matine said.
“Every major city around the world, there are pockets of those communities that would be drastically transformed in a positive way with high-speed walkway networks,” he said.
Beltways is looking for partners in development and people to try the device. You can contact them here.
