Ben Whitaker and the art of getting out of the way

A train ticket is a curious purchase. The customer wants to leave; the transaction asks them to stay put. At an airport, on a business trip back to London, Ben Whitaker, Tom Godber and Giacomo Biggiero found themselves waiting at a ticket machine. Their phones were already capable of doing useful things. Buying permission to board a train seemed a reasonable addition.

That queue belongs in Whitaker’s story because it contains a problem he has returned to for years: the awkward little step between wanting to do something and being allowed to do it. Masabi, the company he co-founded, helped move that step onto the passenger’s phone. His later business, Kerbo Charge, addresses a different obstruction: getting an electric-car charging cable across a pavement.

These are modest objects to build a career around. Neither the ticket machine nor the charging cable is likely to demand its own dressing room. Yet both can decide whether a journey is convenient, affordable or worth attempting. Whitaker has spent much of his working life inside that gap between technical possibility and everyday use.

First, a game. Then, a way through.

His route into transport began somewhere less municipal. Whitaker studied engineering at Cambridge, joining Robinson College in 1997. A first business, started while he was studying manufacturing engineering, failed. The university had given him office space while he tried to turn a course project into a company, and rooms for the Cambridge University Entrepreneurs society. Encouragement and a viable business, as many graduates discover, are separate things.

Masabi followed. Its own early history dates the venture to late 2001, when a group of friends wanted to put the computer game Repton onto mobile phones. By 2004, its work included mobile books, educational games and a way for people to pass Java applications to friends. Before the company tackled how people boarded trains, it was tackling how software reached a handset.

Security was part of the practical work. Whitaker designed EncryptME, Masabi’s mobile cryptography product. In November 2007, as head of security development, he collected an IET Innovation in Engineering award from Johnny Ball and ARM’s Lance Howarth. It is a pleasingly specific early-career scene: mobile security, an engineering prize and a television science enthusiast sharing a stage.

Ticketing made that engineering visible in another way. The barcode on a phone had to be accepted by the people and equipment running the railway. Whitaker helped define the UK rail mobile-ticketing standard. The useful invention included the agreement that let it work beyond one demonstration.

A ticket machine that fits in a pocket

Masabi launched its first public-transport mobile-ticketing application with Chiltern Railways in 2007. In a later interview about the company’s progress, Whitaker singled out the London-Birmingham service as a meaningful change: passengers could arrive, buy a ticket on their phone, receive it immediately and board. The reward was a shorter sequence of chores.

His language at the time was unusually plain for the app business. He argued that apps offered opportunities to solve tangible problems in people’s lives. Games and social networks attracted attention, but he saw everyday frustration as a reason for somebody to try a mobile transaction. Once the new method saved them trouble, it could become a habit.

In April 2014, a First Capital Connect launch brought the idea to journeys involving Cambridge, King’s Cross and King’s Lynn. The app remembered frequent trips and payment information. A repeat purchase could take a few taps. For Whitaker, who had studied, lived and started the business in Cambridge, this put his work onto familiar railway platforms.

There is a personal satisfaction in that kind of return. A university can help someone start a company; years later, the company can help people reach the university. The circle closes with considerably less ceremony than a graduation procession. Someone buys a ticket and catches a train.

The Atlantic crossing was also a sales trip

Boston’s MBTA launched Justride on 12 November 2012. Masabi’s mobile platform had crossed into American commuter rail, where the company would go on to win work for New York’s Long Island Rail Road and Metro-North. For a British specialist, those names offered a persuasive answer to the next customer’s question: has anybody else trusted you with this?

Trust took repeated visits. Whitaker later described travelling to US trade shows so often that people thought he lived in America. Alongside the demonstrations came conversations with existing customers and a commercial arrangement that tied Masabi’s income to use. The company offered a pay-per-use service with little initial financial exposure for the agency.

His argument extended into how public bodies bought software. Detailed specifications could shut out specialists or lock a project into unnecessary custom work. Shared systems could spread improvements across customers. This became a recurring cause in his writing and public appearances: ask what a system needs to achieve, and give its supplier room to deliver it.

The CEO job changed hands on 1 December 2014. Brian Zanghi took over, while Whitaker became head of innovation. The handover kept the founder involved in the product and its direction as another executive took responsibility for the next phase of growth. In 2016, Whitaker received Transport Ticketing’s Industry Contributor of the Year award.

“The greatest opportunities lie in creating apps that solve real world problems.”

Ben Whitaker · Mobile World Live Q&A

Bring what is already in your pocket

Whitaker’s 2016 presentation on Bring Your Own Ticket widened the phone idea. A passenger might already carry a bank card, a wearable or an ID card that could identify their right to travel. A transport operator would then have fewer reasons to manufacture, distribute and manage another dedicated piece of plastic.

It is an engineer’s question with a distinctly domestic flavour: do we already own something that will do? The consequences reach into ticket queues, cash handling and how quickly passengers can board. The idea also needs to work for people with different payment options. His presentation explicitly included options for unbanked passengers.

In November 2022, Masabi appointed him chief evangelist, with a remit to explain shared platforms to governments, agencies and partners. The title came with an established set of arguments about cost, waste and the risks of large custom projects. The founder who had worked on cryptography was now spending considerable effort on how institutions understood and purchased technology.

His podcast, Transit Voices, gives those arguments company. Guests have included David Leininger, whose career includes transit finance and budgets, and payments specialist Simon Laker. Episodes make room for practical details that can disappear in a technology launch: boarding time, old equipment and whether adding a new payment method actually lets an operator retire an old one.

The next obstacle was outside the house

By 2023, Whitaker had moved with his family to Chichester and was working on another transport problem. He and Michael Goulden founded Kerbo Charge in 2022. Goulden is CEO; Whitaker is chief technical officer. The object this time is a channel fitted into the pavement, allowing a resident’s charging cable to reach a parked electric car.

The product addresses an uneven advantage in electric-car ownership. A driveway makes home charging straightforward. A terraced house can put a public footway between the electricity supply and the car. Trailing a loose cable across that footway creates an obstruction. Relying on public charging introduces another set of prices and trips.

Kerbo Charge’s channel sits flush with the pavement. The user inserts a cable and its lid closes over it. The design can flex during installation to follow an uneven surface. It is a small piece of street furniture, designed around the stubborn fact that British pavements do not always resemble the flat surfaces in a product drawing.

Whitaker has discussed the work beyond the product itself: council approval, installation, durability and fitting into different streets. In one interview he described encouraging neighbours to share facilities. The challenge includes making a channel that works and persuading the people responsible for the pavement to let it be installed.

A pavement channel enters the Den

On 15 February 2024, viewers of Dragons’ Den saw Goulden and Whitaker pitch the business. Deborah Meaden offered £50,000 of investment. The founders had carried a local infrastructure problem into a television format better known for making people explain their margins while standing very still.

Goulden later wrote that he had filled in the programme’s application on a train. For a business co-founded by someone who had spent years removing railway inconveniences, the setting feels appropriate. The television appearance put the cable channel in front of a much wider audience; the subsequent work still required trials, council decisions and installations.

The ambition has travelled beyond Britain. Kerbo Charge describes Whitaker flying to Belgium to train a reseller’s team on its first installations. In April 2026, Vauxhall brought the company into its Electric Streets of Britain campaign. A product that begins outside one front door has to find routes through manufacturers, councils, installers and partners to reach the next street.

By October 2026, Whitaker was publicly discussing the variation in installation charges between council areas. The conversation had moved from demonstrating a workable channel to the conditions under which residents could get one. Hardware, once again, was only part of getting a useful idea into ordinary use.

Across Whitaker’s career, the objects change size: a handset, a rail network, a narrow slot in the pavement. The recurring concern is recognisable. A person has somewhere to go, and a system has put something in the way. His work starts by taking that inconvenience seriously. The eventual success can look almost uneventful: the passenger boards, the cable lies flat, and everyone carries on.