Tuverl

Public transport in African countries is very inefficient. It is an industry that is run by millions of private small to medium enterprises and individuals that are Public Transport Operators. Operators have very limited access to finance which has historically been controlled by banks who prefer financing formal businesses over informal public transport operators.

Public Transport Operators are informal businesses that very limited access to financing and capital from financial institutions. They struggle will accessing loans to purchase new vehicles for their fleets and operational capital to finance their operations.

These Operators hire drivers to drive the small fleets of vehicles. This is an informal industry that has a lot of uncertainty. Most Drivers work part time, as such they move around different Operators. This makes keeping Drivers sometimes very difficult for Operators. There is a serious labour mismatch between Drivers who need part time work and Operators who have vehicles. The current hiring process is slow as Operators almost always depend on word of mouth to vet drivers, potential employees.

Drivers waste time, fuel, and man hours trying to locate commuters or park in one place waiting for commuters to find them. Drivers drive around cities and rural areas with no timetables or schedules. This makes Public Transport very unreliable to commuters, who are often late to work or school as a result.

This highly inefficient system means Public Transport operators waste a lot of resources trying to increase the number of commuters per trip and the number of trips. These resources primarily include fuel, diesel or petrol. While both resources are finite, the real danger in an efficient Public Transport system that is heavily dependent on buses and minibuses is in the relentless and unnecessary emission of toxic air pollutants and greenhouse gases into the atmosphere.

Commuters struggle with locating Buses and Minibuses as they are often piled up at “Taxi” Ranks or docked at inconvenient locations. On boarding Public Transport, commuters often experience delays as drivers search for passengers to fill up the vehicle. Local Authorities barely regulate the sector, which leads to poor standards. This results in poor customer service as commuters are often mistreated by Drivers and Conductors.

The industry exclusively accepts cash, as the only acceptable form of payment. This coupled with a lack of a mechanism to monitor the number of trips and commuters Public Transport Drivers pick up in day, creates an industry that is fraught with embezzlement, and a lack of accountability. As such Public Transport Operators lose money.

The absence of a fair market-based mechanism for passengers to evaluate and rate drivers, their vehicles and services to improve customer service exacerbates poor service delivery on the part of operators and drivers. Commuters lack a convenient way to purchase bus tickets and they don't have a central repository of information about bus timetables.

Tuverl seeks to make Public Transport cheaper and more accessible to millions of commuters across Africa. Tuverl leverages Cloud Computing, Data Analytics, Geolocation, and FinTech to improve and optimize Public Transport and fundamentally change how commuters in African countries pay for it, starting with Zimbabwe. Using the Tuverl App, Commuters can live track intracity buses and minibuses, book intercity trips, hail a Taxi and pay for their fares digitally.

We empower Operators with asset financing for their vehicles and fleets. We offer operators fully registered, and serviced vehicles that they pay for over a 24 months period; during which they use the Tuverl Operator App to help them optimize their operations.

Asset Financing.

We offer vehicle Asset financing to public transport operators to finance clean and energy efficient vehicles and fleets. We offer operators fully registered, and serviced vehicles that they pay for over a 24 months period. The vehicle comes with compressive vehicle trackers, comprehensive insurance cover for 24 months. Complete public transport licensing. Operators can be small to medium enterprises who are operating a small fleet of vehicles or individual drivers that have all the requisite licensing to drive Public Service vehicles like Taxis, Minibuses and Buses. We only do a criminal background check, otherwise we do not require any collateral for the financing. The vehicle itself is the collateral. We currently have 35 vehicles on Asser Financing and we are generating revenue. Drivers or operators pay for the vehicle with monthly installments for 24 months.

Tuverl Commuter App

Using the Tuverl App, Commuters can live track intracity buses and minibuses, book intercity trips on buses, hail a Taxi on demand and pay for their Public Transportation using local fintech solutions. Commuters can rate and review their trips helping in creating a transparent industry that fosters quality customer service. We have shared a link to the product demo. We are running a pilot in Bulawayo Zimbabwe; the product will be publicly available to all commuters at the end of April 2023.

Tuverl Operator App

The Tuverl Operator App empowers Drivers and Operators with technology to broadcast the live locations of their vehicles, manage their fleets, and process fares digitally. This helps these two stakeholders to increase the number of commuters per trip, increase the number of trips per day and reduce usage of resources like fuel and man hours that are wasted by randomly searching for commuters. We incentivize Operators to maximize the dollar revenue they collect per unit gallon of fuel they use, by offering them a tool that helps them increase the number of commuters per trip and the number of trips per day. We are currently running a pilot for the Operator App. It will be live at the end of April 2023.

The Public Transport Industry in Africa has a Total Addressable Market of US $65B. We can capture a Serviceable Obtainable Market (SOM) of roughly US$10B.  The SOM includes our primary Target Market. We derived these figures by considering the number of Public Transport Operators with a small fleet of vehicles ranging from 1-10. These vehicles could include Minibuses with a capacity of 16 passengers or Buses with a capacity of 65 passengers in all the major countries in each region of Africa.

For Asset Financing and the Tuverl Operator App; we are targeting public transport operators and individual drivers with a fleet of 1-10 vehicles, who operate in urban and peri-urban areas of African cities and towns.

Our target market includes Commuters between the age of 18-65 years, and Operators and Drivers between the ages of 25-65 years. These commuters and operators live in Urban Cities, they own smartphones, are smartphone literate, have a Mobile Banking and generally use social media regularly.  Public Transport Operators are owners of small to medium enterprises with a small fleet of vehicles ranging from 1-10. These vehicles could include Minibuses with a capacity of 16 passengers or Buses with a capacity of 65 passengers.

We have 16 full time team members. Our executive team has a collection of skills, and wealth of knowledge that puts Tuverl is good position to succeed.

CEO: Hope Ndhlovu holds a B.A. in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from Harvard University. He grew up in Bulawayo, Zimbabwe and is always looking for ways to leverage technology to solve challenges faced by people in Africa. Hope is a full stack Software Developer.

COO: Nyasha Ndhlovu, holds a Bachelor’s Degree in Psychology from Midlands State University. Nyasha is responsible for Operations. He is currently taking classes part time for a Masters in Monitoring and Evaluation. He many deals with Tuverl Drivers, hiring, coordinating customer acquisition for Asset Financing, Procurement and dealing with suppliers and service providers. 

Before travelling to the USA, to study at Harvard University, I used to commute to Public High School every day using Minibuses (Matatus). Minibuses were very inefficient that I was late to school for the majority of my high school going days. A poorly financed and resourced Public Transport industry is the root cause of long commutes. Financing and capacitating Operators with technology will make public transport faster, cheaper, safer, improve the lives of the commuting masses in Zimbabwe and Africa. I spent all of 2021 in Kenya and Zimbabwe, building my network of public transport operators, interviewing customers and twerking our product offering.

Our Advisers include Wolf Ruzicka. Helen Manich, Matt Caywood:  and Diego Canales at TransitScreen. They all have experience working at or with Public Transport related companies in the USA and developing countries.

Adviser: Matt Caywood and Diego Caneles

Matt Caywood and Diego Canales are CEO and Global Data Partnerships Manager respectively at TransitScreen. They are our advisors and mentors. Matt brings experience in startups sphere and does work in transportation. His company mainly develops screens that are deployed in most buildings to show the location/arrival times of public transport. Matt has a great experience working with transportation companies in emerging markets, mainly in Latin America but has also worked in a few companies based in Africa.

Adviser: Wolf Ruzicka

Wolf Ruzicka is the chairman of Eastbanc Technologies. Wolf is our advisor and mentor. He has extensive experience in the public transport industry. His company has worked in developing tracking technologies for public transport in various cities across the US, including in Washington D.C and Austin, Texas..

Adviser: Helen Manich

Helen Manich is the President of Manich Strategies Inc. She is our pricing and revenue advisor. She has worked as the Chief Marketing Officer and Vice President of Marketing for various telecommunication companies including AT&T. Her current company offers revenue strategies consulting. She has worked on numerous startups, particularly impact-based ones like Tuverl to ensure that their revenue streams and impact are maximized. 

The Public Transport Industry in Africa has a Total Addressable Market of US $65B. We can capture a Serviceable Obtainable Market (SOM) of roughly US$10B.  The SOM includes our primary Target Market. We derived these figures by considering the number of Public Transport Operators with a small fleet of vehicles ranging from 1-10. These vehicles could include Minibuses with a capacity of 16 passengers or Buses with a capacity of 65 passengers in all the major countries in each region of Africa.

For Asset Financing and the Tuverl Operator App; we are targeting public transport operators and individual drivers with a fleet of 1-10 vehicles, who operate in urban and peri-urban areas of African cities and towns.

Our target market includes Commuters between the age of 18-65 years, and Operators and Drivers between the ages of 25-65 years. These commuters and operators live in Urban Cities, they own smartphones, are smartphone literate, have a Mobile Banking and generally use social media regularly.  Public Transport Operators are owners of small to medium enterprises with a small fleet of vehicles ranging from 1-10. These vehicles could include Minibuses with a capacity of 16 passengers or Buses with a capacity of 65 passengers.

Tuverl has reached product market fit with Asset Financing for Public Transport Operators. We have financed 35 vehicles and we have backlog of 63 applicants who are eagerly waiting to join. Purchasing actual vehicles takes a lot of capital, we want experiment with 2 different funding models.

Banks want to give public transport operators loans for small businesses to start and grow their operations. However, the fact that these businesses have no collateral, traceable income and paper trail in the form of ticketing, it is very difficult for banks to provide the necessary funding with incurring a lot of risk. We believe we can work with banks to give out these financing loans through Tuverl. For example, a Bank can offer Tuverl US$70,000. We can convert that cash into 10 vehicles, identify drivers and operators, brand the vehicles Tuverl, install vehicle trackers and signup these operators onto the Tuverl App, and place them on 24 months payment schedules for vehicles. Tuverl can enforce standards, control asset retrieval in case of disputes and ensure Operators and drivers are keeping their payment schedules. Zimbabwean banks usually give out loans at 12% interest rate. For a vehicle we secured for a total of US$7,000 per car, with a repayment schedule of US$700 per month, we can repay the bank their money including their interest and have some leftover as our service fee.

We also looking at the African diaspora market for people who can finance vehicles and we pretty much have a similar deal to the banks.

We believe joining Solve can help rethink some of these models as we prepare for a major fundraising round. We need support to optimize our standard operating procedures for things like hiring, importing vehicles, registering vehicles and general operations.

The Solve Challenge Prize can also help us test our products in more cities and towns in Zimbabwe.

There are some companies that are in the Public Transport/Taxi/Carpooling space in Africa. Our competition includes Vaya Africa, Vaya Africa, InDrive, Bolt (formerly Taxify), Little Cab, Hwindi, and Easy Taxi for hailing taxis, and Wanderu & MyRunnerBuses for booking buses.

Vaya Africa- https://www.vayaafrica.com/ods . Vaya Africa is a Taxi Hailing App owned by CassavaSmartTech. This is a replica of Uber.

InDrive https://indrive.com/en/home/ InDrive, is an international ride-hailing service with more than 150 million downloads operating in 47 countries. Headquartered in Mountain View, California, it is the second largest ridesharing and taxi app worldwide by downloads. The company was officially launched in 2013. InDrive currently operates in Harare.

Uber - https://www.uber.com/. It is a global ride hailing app that has made some strides around the world but barely made a dent in African countries. They are not yet available in Zimbabwe. Uber has faced significant retaliation from public transport drivers in South Africa

Swvl - https://swvl.com/. It is offering a hybrid of Uber and Public Transport meaning instead of improving the current infrastructure of public transport, it introduces more vehicles.

WhereIsMyTransport -https://www.whereismytransport.com/. WhereIsMyTransport is currently focusing on mapping routes for public transport in African cities.

Bolt - https://bolt.eu/ .Bolt, formerly known as Taxify, is an Estonian transportation network company founded and headquartered in Tallinn, Estonia.

Most of our competitors focus on ride-hailing except for WhereIsMyTransport which focuses on route mapping. While ride-hailing apps make requesting for Taxis easier, Operators primarily struggle with access to finance and technology to help them improve their operations and grow their fleets and businesses. 

While Africa has 54 countries, the Public Transport Landscape is the same from Cape Town in South Africa to Cairo in Egypt. This means we can easily scale our product throughout the continent with very few changes to our customer acquisition strategy.

We are merging the use of ride-hailing technology with vehicle asset financing. 83% of Public Transport operators we interviewed said their biggest challenge is accessing financing services and capital from banks and financial institutions. Most operators are not registered, they do not have bank accounts or any ticketing technology. It’s very difficult to understand their cashflow, as such Banks do not accommodate them without unassailable proof that they have the collateral to support loan applications. “Unassailable proof” is ever elusive in some these banks that particularly serve established and formal businesses.

We are coupling Asset Financing and Ride Sharing. This is groundbreaking because it addresses the main issue that most informal Public Transport Operators face, which is lack of access to capital and financial services from formal financial institution. The Ride sharing app helps operators and drivers manage their operations and adds a layer of paper trail. This hybrid model is a better fit for the African market than what all our local and global competitors are offering.

Our long-term goal is to make public transport cheaper and more accessible to commuters across African countries. We seek to achieve SDG 11-Sustainable Cities and Communities and SDG-Decent Work and Economic Growth.

SDG 11-Sustainable Cities and Communities

Tuverl is seeks to make public transport in African countries easily accessible, cheaper and more efficient for the commuting public in African countries. Currently commuters lose valuable productive time worth billions of dollars every year as a result of public transport that is always late and inefficient. Commuters have no way of predicting when they will get their next bus of vehicle. On boarding they have no way of telling how long that trip will take as public operators often park at one bus stop to wait for their vehicles to fill up. We believe bringing technology into the market to help commuters with more information can help them plan their trips better.

SDG 8- Decent Work and Economic Growth

Asset Financing for Public Transport Operators and drivers ensures that these stakeholders have access to capital and financial services to help them run their businesses better.  They are currently an underserved business community due to the fact that they are mostly informal businesses with no ticketing and ways to keep track of their revenue and operations.

SDG 13: Climate Action

All vehicles under our asset financing scheme are hybrid energy efficient vehicles. This is the very big step in helping modernize public transport vehicles in Africa countries. We hope to fully finance electric vehicles in the future. This will help reduce the carbon footprint of the public transport sector in African countries.

In the next 6 months we plan on launching the Tuverl Commuter and Operators apps (end of April 2023), scaling in Bulawayo and Harare (2 biggest cities in Zimbabwe) We would like to Asset Finance 300 vehicles by September 2023. We are currently fundraising US$3M in order to reach our goals.

At Tuverl we are solving a socio-economic problem. To measure our success, we will measure metrics for Commuters and Drivers Public Transport Operators.

For commuters will measure several metrics such as the average wait times of commuters at bus stops to determine the reduction in wait time.

For Public Transport Operators to measure the change in revenue generated, change in costs of production and operational costs that include cost of total fuel consumed per unit commuter moved from place to another. For Drivers we measure the change in the number of commuters per trip and the number of trips. An increase in both figures signals that our app is definitively offering value to Drivers and Operators. We will also be keeping track of the ratio of mobile money transactions against cash transactions to verify commuter’s payment preferences and the efficacy of digital payments as a means of encouraging transparency and preventing embezzlement and corruption by Drivers.

We are merging the use of ride-hailing technology with vehicle asset financing. 83% of Public Transport operators we interviewed said their biggest challenge is accessing financing services and capital from banks and financial institutions. Most operators are not registered, they do not have bank accounts or any ticketing technology. It’s very difficult to understand their cashflow, as such Banks do not accommodate them without unassailable proof that they have the collateral to support loan applications. “Unassailable proof” is ever elusive in some of these white controlled banks that particularly serve established and formal businesses

Providing energy efficient Public Transport vehicles  and technology to Public Transport Operators  can fundamentally improve the state of public transport in African countries.

Tuverl leverages Cloud Computing, Data Analytics, Geolocation, geographic information system (GIS), SMS and FinTech to improve and optimize Public Transport and fundamentally change how commuters in African countries pay for it, starting with Zimbabwe.

We are a team of black entrepreneurs operating from Zimbabwe. 40% of our workforce is women. Our team comes of diverse backgrounds in Zimbabwe including minority ethnicities. We have broad selection of skills from software development, finance, psychology, accounting. We have also been educated both in African Universities like University of Zimbabwe, Midlands State University and abroad including Universities like Harvard University.

Tuverl is a for-profit social venture, but to ensure that Tuverl remains Financially Sustainable, we have a B2B Business Model for Asset Financing complimented by a three-pronged pricing model for ticketing. Intercity (Between cities and towns) Buses, Intracity (within cities) Buses and Minibus and

We offer public transport operators fully registered, and serviced vehicles that they pay for over a 24 months period. An average vehicle (Toyota March 2013) costs US$7,000, including the cost of registration, insurance and licensing. Over 2 years Tuverl spend another US$700 on the vehicle for further compliance. We charge an Operator US$700 for 24 Months. Taxi Operators generally generate a net income of US$1200 per month. We are currently doing Asset Financing for Taxis, but we plan on adding Minibuses, Vans, and Buses.

We charge Public Transport operators a commission for every trip ticketed on the Tuverl App.

The Average cost of an Intercity trip is US$10. Single Buses have 72 seats and make an average of 2 trips a day. At full capacity a single bus makes US$1440 a day. Charging 5% per bus ticket sold on the Tuverl App generates US$72 per bus per day.

The average cost of an Intracity Bus or Minibus trip is US$0.50. A Minibus has an average capacity of 16 seats and makes an average of 15 trips a day. At full capacity a Minibus generates about US$120 a day and $840 a week, for a Public Transport Operator. We will be charging an equivalent of US$40 for weekly subscription per vehicle.

 The average price of a Taxi trip is US$5. A Taxi has an average of 30 trips a day. Taxi operators make about US$150 a day. Charging 10% per Taxi trip, we will be generating about US$15 of revenue from a single Taxi Operator per vehicle per day.

The long term plan for financial sustainability is revenue. However to develop our products, and build Tuverl we have relied of institutional funding from Conscious Venture Labs,  grant funding, and pitch competitions. 

It was incredibly difficult to secure our first institutional investment, but we have made significant progress with regards to traction and growth.

The Tuverl team has been incredible resourceful in accumulating and mobilizing resources to make our vision of building a sustainable public transport system in Africa possible.

The Tuverl team has earned US$288 000 in institutional funding from grants, incubator programs and pitch competitions and earned revenue.

We raised a pre-seed US$120 000 round of funding from Conscious Venture Labs (Baltimore based Accelerator) in August 2022.

 Tuverl received the following grants:  US$50 00 from Total Energies Energy Access Booster Grant, and US$10 000 from Halcyon Incubator.

Tuverl has received several awards and recognition. We most won the Georgetown Africa Business Conference Pitch Competition, winning a US$5000 1st prize.

We won the World Bank Youth Summit Pitch Competition in early December 2019 held at the World Bank Headquarters in Washington DC. We finished second place and won US$25 000 from the Harvard President’s Challenge LLX GEO

Tuverl won the YouthConnekt Sustainable Development Goals Video Competition, where we walked away with ZWL$$5 000. As part of the 10th cohort of Halcyon Incubator Program, we were awarded US$10 000 cash funding and free housing. We have participated in several pitch competitions, winning the US$1 000 Fan Favorite at the RevRoad Pitch Competition in Provo, Utah, and US$15 000 at the Harvard China Forum Pitch Competition in Cambridge, Massachusetts. We participated in the MassChallenge Accelerator Boston Cohort in 2018.

We have generated US$163 000 in revenue since February 2021, when we started generating revenue from our operations.