John and Matine Yuksel are on a mission to fulfill their father’s lifelong vision while trying to transform pedestrian travel in public spaces.
In 2020, the brothers founded Beltways, a startup developing a modular accelerating walkway—an idea conjured by their father, Edip. Despite being only four years old, the company has won multiple startup competitions and featured in prominent publications such as Business Insider and Forbes magazine.
Their business journey has taken them from Silicon Valley, the world’s breadbasket of technology startups and venture capital money, to the cornfields of Iowa and, eventually, Hebron — the site of the Cincinnati/Northern Kentucky International Airport.
The brothers are currently in talks with CVG about potentially deploying their modular accelerating walkway at the airport and then conducting a historic pilot demonstration sometime next year. In an interview with LINK nky, John said that once the walkway is deployed, Beltways will have the only active accelerating walkway in the world.
From the ground up
Edip Yuksel grew up in Turkey. From an early age, he was interested in physics and engineering. He went on to study engineering at Middle East Technical University. His vision was to create a pedestrian transit machine that could move people more efficiently. As a freshman, he created a concept design for a modular and pit-less accelerating walkway.
“If you have also a creative mind and imagination, you can come up with many solutions,” Edip told LINK nky.
Despite his engineering gravitas, Edip had another passion as a young man: politics. At 19, he became a leader in a prominent political youth movement that was critical of the Turkish government. His involvement in the movement diverted his focus away from engineering.
In 1979, tragedy struck as Edip’s younger brother Metin was assassinated by Turkish ultranationalists at only 20 years old. Edip was eventually imprisoned for several years as a response to his writings. From then on, Edip’s career focused primarily on politics, philosophy and religion. Around a decade later, he emigrated to the United States.
Unlike Edip, his sons didn’t start out in engineering. They forged their own paths in Silicon Valley’s tech and law sectors. John worked as an attorney in San Francisco, while Matine was a global supply manager for Apple.
Then, the COVID-19 pandemic hit, allowing John and Matine to reevaluate their career aspirations. Around this time, Edip was patenting several inventions from his college years.
One was the modular accelerating walkway, an idea the brothers were drawn to immediately. Upon surveying the market, they realized there was a need for short-range mass transit. They envisioned their father’s modular walkway as a viable solution.
“It was COVID at the time. We said, listen, there’s no better opportunity for us than to start our company right now on a technology that was invented by our father and that we feel strongly about pushing forward with,” John told LINK nky. “I thought it was a great confluence of multiple factors.”
Sensing the moment, the brothers decided to transition out of their careers to pursue their startup full-time. Thus, Beltways was born. Currently, John serves as Beltways’ CEO and Matine as chief operating officer. Edip is the company’s chief innovation officer.
For the next step, the brothers realized they needed to move away from San Francisco in order to be closer to key parts suppliers. This led them to relocate to Iowa, where Beltways’ first prototype was built and revealed.
Move to Northern Kentucky
Now that John and Matine had their prototype, the company’s next move was to begin the commercialization process. Ultimately, they decided that installing their modular walkway inside an airport would be the most effective way to launch their product.
On average, American airports see some of the highest levels of daily pedestrian foot traffic. The Federal Aviation Administration’s Air Traffic Organization provides service to approximately 2.9 million airline passengers
John explained that American airports presented an opportunity for Beltways to demonstrate their modular walkway in a clean and controlled environment.
“It’s a very clean indoor environment, which is ideal for a first product launch,” John said. “The indoor was nice and conducive, but also it’s a microcosm of a city. An intense amount of people is traveling through that place every year.”
After surveying several airport executives and visiting airports around the country, John recognized they were getting one consensus answer: CVG. The brothers contacted CVG’s Chief Innovation Officer Brian Cobb, who was intrigued by the opportunity.
In 2022, the Beltways team packed their bags and headed to Boone County. Being located near CVG allowed Beltways access to cheaper warehouse space and closer proximity to parts suppliers. The Greater Cincinnati area also gave Beltways more access to capital as the brothers sought to continue growing the company.
Since moving to the area, Beltways has courted attention and capital from several entrepreneurial support organizations, including Blue North, Keyhorse Capital and Main Street Ventures.
In 2023, Main Street Ventures gave Beltways a $26,130 Leap Grant, which provides revenue-generating businesses with $10,000 to $30,000 of equity-free funding to scale their businesses and increase their sustainability.
Abby Ober, Main Street Ventures’ director of engagement, said the organization wanted to help Beltways take its product to the next level.
“We thought it was a really good fit just based on type of company; really great founders, what they’re looking at and where they’re looking to go,” Ober said.
How does it work?
Many American airports feature horizontal conveyor walkways. Its design is reminiscent of something you might see in an Amazon warehouse moving cardboard boxes around. These walkways are generally installed indoors and operate 24/7 at a low speed akin to a natural walking pace.
John and Matine bemoaned how often conveyor walkways in U.S. airports seem to be under repair or shut down altogether.
CVG, specifically, has several conveyor-style walkways installed throughout the airport.
Beltways’ accelerating walkways center around the idea of modularity, which basically means dividing a system into a series of separate modules or components.
Beltways’ moving walkway consists of several smaller treadmill-like modules, each programmed to run at different speeds. The separate modules allow the walkway to be customizable in terms of speed and length.
When developing their first prototype, Matine said they purchased approximately $10,000 worth of walking pads during a Black Friday sale on Amazon. They retrofitted each pad into a singular component of the walkway’s chain. Each module is assembled side-by-side in a horizontal line, building out the chain.
The modules are then hooked up to an automated control panel that regulates their speed. Each module has a different speed profile.
How it works is the modules at the beginning of the chain move at a slower speed to make onboarding safer and more accessible. As the walkway propels the pedestrian forward onto subsequent modules, the speed is increased.
Toward the middle of the chain, speeds can reach up to 10 miles per hour – the maximum allowed by industry regulations. When a pedestrian approaches the exit point, each module moderately decreases speed, allowing for a smooth offboarding.
“Normally, the way we think about this is the speed differential between modules,” Matine explained during a demonstration. “Right now, he’s (John) showing you an 0.1 acceleration between modules. 1.2 (miles per hour) is the starting speed. The next one’s 1.3 and then so on.”
The walkway’s design allows the pedestrian to experience gradual and imperceptible changes in speed. Beltways’ website states that their walkways move up to 10 times faster than conventional airport walkways.
Currently, John and Matine are developing the third-generation prototype of their walkway, which is wider and features torso-high paneling that acts as guardrails.
While installing conveyor walkways is a time-consuming process that requires construction teams to dig into the ground, Beltways’ walkway is installed module-by-module above ground level. This allows Beltways to deploy their walkway within days while minimizing construction.
“We think that there’s a huge advantage by making a completely different design that’s faster, safer, smarter, and bringing it into the modern industrial automation world — bringing it into the high speed world,” John said.
Looking toward the future
Since moving to Northern Kentucky, John and Matine have expanded Beltways’ workforce to 10 and are looking to hire more. The brothers are currently focused on commercialization and company expansion, two goals that will help bolster Beltways’ long-term ambitions.
John and Matine have grand visions for the application of their walkway. If all goes well, airports are just the starting point. The brothers hope to install Beltways’ systems in convention centers, downtown areas and public transportation stations. Essentially, anywhere where pedestrians are.
“400 million times a day in the U.S., people use a car or some other vehicle to drive less than a mile,” John said. “Imagine if those vehicle trips could be pedestrian trips. It’s a paradigm change for environments like downtown Chicago, New York, L.A., San Francisco – those big cities will benefit greatly from this.”
John and Matine wouldn’t label themselves as disruptors – an overplayed, Silicon Valley-esque label carelessly thrown around nowadays. Instead, they are focused on bringing Edip’s vision to life.
“It is a more than a 40-year-old dream,” Edip said in a video published on the Beltways website. “I had it. I put it at rest. I buried it, and then it was resurrected several years ago, and it was put into reality by two of my sons and my students.”