LONDON, 24th June 2026 - Hoppa, the AI-powered data refinery for the built environment, has been selected as one of six businesses – from a field of 90 applicants – for the final, fully-funded stage of the HS2 Accelerator, the innovation programme delivered by Connected Places Catapult on behalf of High Speed 2 (HS2). Hoppa is focusing on the programme's "Smarter cost verification" challenge: how AI can give commercial managers faster, sharper insight into the costs flowing through one of the UK's largest infrastructure programmes.
"HS2 receives millions of invoices, but we can only check 10% for accuracy," said Jonathan Kelly, Senior Innovation Manager at HS2. "The risk that disallowable and fraudulent claims go undetected is enormous. This isn't just an HS2 problem, it's universal."
The challenge is to proactively identify and manage disallowable costs; spend that should not be charged to the project. On a programme the scale of HS2, these costs are buried across vast volumes of invoices, spreadsheets and PDFs, far more than any team can review by hand in agreed timescales. Hoppa's technology is designed to surface the items that genuinely merit scrutiny and cut the false positives that consume reviewers' time, letting skilled commercial managers focus their judgement where it matters most. Following a rigorous evaluation process, Hoppa is now working alongside the HS2 team to accelerate and scale up their demonstrator into a trial project.
The work comes at a pivotal moment. Following the Government's HS2 reset, announced in Parliament in May 2026, HS2's leadership is reviewing supply chain contracts and incentives with the explicit aim of completing the railway at the lowest reasonable cost. Stronger, faster cost verification speaks directly to that agenda - improving financial control without adding headcount, and helping ensure public money is spent on building the railway rather than on avoidable cost leakage.
"Major infrastructure programmes generate more information than any team can realistically read during a project’s lifecycle, and that's exactly where value gets lost," said Sam Rees, CEO & Co-founder of Hoppa. "We don't replace the expert commercial manager – we do the heavy lifting of finding and organising the relevant information so their expertise is pointed at the right things. It’s exciting to be contributing to a nationally significant project like HS2 at such a pivotal moment in its delivery."
Hoppa brings a strong track record of delivering information intelligence across the full asset lifecycle, with work spanning some of the UK's most demanding regulated sectors – including water, aviation and nuclear – where locating the right information quickly carries real safety, compliance and financial impact.
Rather than acting as another data store, Hoppa sits on top of existing systems, analysing documents where they already live and applying consistent, structured metadata – labelling information far faster than manual review, while files remain in the customer's own custody throughout. The platform is built around a human-in-the-loop principle: high-confidence results are accepted quickly, while ambiguous cases are flagged for review with a confidence score and supporting rationale. People retain control of the decisions that matter, and the system improves through their corrections – an approach Hoppa regards as core to the responsible use of AI in regulated, finance-critical settings.
Enquiries · hello@hoppa.ai
About Hoppa
Hoppa is an AI-powered data refinery platform for the built environment, founded by civil engineers Tom Goldsmith and Sam Rees. Hoppa helps infrastructure owners and their supply chains automatically organise, classify and govern the documents and data created over an asset's lifecycle, turning fragmented, hard-to-find information into structured, reliable data teams can use. It sits on top of existing systems as an integration and automation layer, keeps customers in custody of their own information and empowers human teams to make decisions with confidence.
About the HS2 Accelerator
The HS2 Accelerator is an innovation programme delivered by Connected Places Catapult on behalf of HS2, connecting innovative small businesses with one of the UK's largest infrastructure projects to develop new technology business cases and pilots. Since launching in 2020, it has supported 37 small technology firms, who have collectively secured 33 pilot projects across HS2 and contributed to more than £50 million in cost savings against the HS2 baseline. The current eighth iteration focuses on Data and AI-themed challenges, including Smarter cost verification.
