Tuverl

In most African countries, Commuters in Urban and Rural areas struggle to locate reliable Public Transport. They are often late to work or school as a result of Inefficient Public Transport. Public Transport vehicles (“Matatus”) don’t have any schedules and defined routes. They waste fuel driving around looking for commuters or parked at inconveniently located bus stops.

Tuverl is an app that seeks to make Public Transport cheaper and more accessible to millions of commuters across Africa by helping Public Transport Operators optimize their routes, reduce operational costs and increase revenue. Tuverl seeks to promote smart, resilient and sustainable Cities and Communities by improving Urban mobility and public transportation.

Tuverl leverages Data Analytics, Geolocation, Fintech, and Machine Learning to improve and optimize Public Transport and fundamentally change how commuters in African countries pay for it, starting with Zimbabwe. 

In most African countries, Public Transport is an industry that is run by private companies; millions of small to medium enterprises that are Public Transport Operators. These Public Transport Operators hire drivers to drive around cities with no timetables or schedules. This makes Public Transport very unreliable to commuters, who are often late to work or school as a result. Drivers also waste time, fuel, and man hours trying to locate commuters along their designated routes or park in one place waiting for commuters to find them.

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

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 public transport inefficiency in Africa affects over 100 million daily commuters and 5 million operators across the continent. Tuverl is piloting in Zimbabwe where, once we are in full operation, we will impact the current 6 million daily public transport commuters.

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.

Our Serviceable Obtainable Market (SOM) Includes our target market. We are targeting Commuters between the age of 18-24 years, and Operators and Drivers between the ages of 20-34 years. These commuters and operators live in Urban Cities, they own smartphones, are smartphone literate, use Mobile Banking and generally use social media regularly. This is a demographic that is already accustomed to using mobile money or fintech to pay for goods and services.  They have very little customer behavior to change if any.

Public Transport Operators are the 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 leverages Smartphones, Cloud Computing, Data Analytics, Geolocation, FinTech, and Machine Learning to improve and optimize Public Transport and fundamentally change how commuters in African countries pay for it, starting with Zimbabwe.

We have 2 Mobile Applications, a Commuter App for commuters and an Operator App for Public Transport Operators.

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.

The Tuverl Operator App empowers Drivers and Operators with tools 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.

Using Tuverl helps Operators with improving the level of transparency and accountability in the way that Drivers operate. Using digital payments reduces cases of revenue leakages and embezzlement of cash collected by Drivers.

The Operator App will fundamentally change the way millions of Public Transport Operators across Africa conduct their businesses. They will have access to more data about where they vehicles are, how many trips their drivers did, how many commuters they picked up, and how much revenue was collected. The Tuverl apps helps to support and strengthen Public Transport Operators, who are often small to medium enterprises.  Our product empowers a Workforce that is often neglected.

Current and exiting solutions in and around African countries, includes Uber, Bolt (formerly Taxify), Vaya, Swvl, WhereIsMyTransport, Hwindi, and ZimTaxi.

These companies mostly offer Taxi or Carpooling services. In Zimbabwe alone, about 80% of all commutes in urban and rural areas are done using Public Transportation that is in the form of Minibuses. While Taxi related apps facilitate connecting rides to Taxis, they do not address the problem of inefficient public Transportation that most Zimbabweans face every day. Tuverl is the first app to focus on minibuses. Minibuses are the primary public transport for most low to middle income Africans. Our product caters to the bottom of the pyramid, something that Taxi, and Carpooling services do not do. Existing Taxi apps are often seen as luxurious and fancy apps for tourists, but do not address the entrenched problems that commuters and public transport operators face on a day to day basis.

Our app is a lot easier to scale across the African as the Public Transport systems from South Africa to Egypt are identical.

In efficient Public Transport significantly wastes productive time for commuters who either must wait long waits at bus stops or take unnecessarily long trips. Losses in valuable productive time for Africans is worth billions of dollars every year. By helping Public Transport optimize their routes, we ensure that commuters do not lose any productive time while commuting.

 For commuters we will measure several metrics such as the change in the average wait times of commuters at bus stops, change in price of public transport trips. A high reduction in the average wait time is the desired outcome, as this means we are helping commuters save on productive time.

To measure impact for Public Transport Operators, we will keep track of 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 hope to 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.

 This is consistent with our goal of strengthening existing small businesses. 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.

Tuverl currently has a Public Beta App that is available on the Google Play Store. We have 30 Public Transport Operators in the city of Bulawayo that are currently participating in our beta/pilot program. They have total fleet of 87 vehicles. We have 253 Commuters on the Commuter App who are Beta testers. We are soliciting much needed feedback on the user experience and app functionality before we launch our full product on 3 April 2020.

In 1 year, we will be serving 60000 commuters and 3500 Operators in Zimbabwe. We are planning to scale from Bulawayo (the second biggest city in Zimbabwe) to Harare, Masvingo, Gweru and all the regions in Zimbabwe. In 5 years, we hope to be Serving 15 Million Commuters in and around South African and 250 000 Public Transport Operators in the region. We hope to scale to other regions of the continent with a focus on countries that include Kenya, Nigeria, Ghana, Ethiopia, and Egypt, the big markets on the continent.

Tuverl aims to transform the way public transport operates in Africa and other emerging markets. In 10 years, we foresee African cities that have fully integrated the Tuverl mobile app. Full integration of Tuverl will improve the efficiency of public transport and how cities operate especially in terms of increased productive time that commuters are currently losing waiting at bus stops for public transport. Tuverl will give people, especially the middle to lower-income Africans, more control over their time and enabling them to better plan.

Equally important, the route optimization Tuverl introduces to drivers means there is significantly less fuel consumed per trip. This has environmental implications as 75% of carbon monoxide is from vehicles. Creating a more efficient system means there will be less emission of toxic pollutant gases and greenhouse gases that contribute to global warming.

Tuverl is therefore central in creating smart cities that provide their citizens with a very reliable and efficient public transport improving productive time and reducing vehicle pollution.

There are several challenges that we are anticipating. Some of the challenges are infrastructural constraints and some have to do with an entrenched culture of doing business in the Public Transport sector, an informal sector.

The cost of mobile data in most African countries is quite high and some cities have very spotty internet connectivity. We believe this is a general problem we will face as we scale to different cities in Zimbabwe and different countries in Africa. However, the general prices of data have declined over the past 10 years. We are very optimistic that as some reports seem to forecast, this general trend will continue, and mobile data will be accessible to a wider population.

Working with public transport drivers who are allegedly benefiting from the cash only system due its lack of accountability might be difficult. 

The solution we’re working on involves collaborating with Public Transport Operators to develop a commission-based financial incentive that enables drivers to receive a share of the profits if they surpass specific daily revenue targets. We plan to incentivize them to use the app by demonstrating with real numbers that they will generate more revenue from using the app as they can see the locations of checked in commuters, thus reducing partially filled trips and increasing the number of trips per day. Our current incentive model aims to demonstrate to both stakeholders that their revenue will improve from using Tuverl, both from reduced route optimization and higher commuters per trip.  

The general trend has been a significant increase in the number of people using smartphones, and a notable rise in the proliferation of mobile banking solutions. This coupled with a decrease in the cost of 3G and 4G enabled smartphones over the past 10 years has led to an increased use of smartphones and the internet.  We are planning on piloting and scaling our product in cities and towns, while Telecoms companies increase their infrastructure in rural areas. Connectivity has and will generally improve in African cities and rural areas.

While Inefficient Public Transport plagues the developing world, It is our view that our solution has place in helping to optimize Public Transport in the USA and Europe. While we will compete with apps like Wanderu in USA, we believe our app has a competitive product offering and value proposition. In 3 years’, time we hope to scale into the USA and Canada, starting with Washington DC.

Public Transport in the USA alone has a Total Address Market of US$72B. We will primarily target the intercity trip market by selling tickets for companies like Greyhound, Megabus, PeterPan e.t.c

Tuverl has 2 Full time Co-Founders, 1 Part Time Team member and 3 Interns and 4 Advisers.

CEO: Hope Ndhlovu

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/hope-ndhlovu/

CTO: Bahlakoana Mabetha

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/bahlakoana-mabetha-78286290/

Board Member and RevRoad Adviser: Joel Beus

LinkedIn:  https://www.linkedin.com/in/joel-beus-18299a7/

Adviser: Matt Caywood

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/caywood/

Adviser: Diego Caneles

LinkedIn:  https://www.linkedin.com/in/diegocanales/

Adviser: Wolf Ruzicka

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/wolfruzicka/

Adviser: Helen Manich

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/helenmanich/

Our team includes interns from George Washington University students that include Juliette Geller (Graphic Design), Elias Ross Trupin (Market Research) and Aravind Gudumala (Software Engineering) a Computer Science Masters Student

Our team has a collection of skills, and wealth of knowledge that puts Tuverl in a good position to succeed. Tuverl has two Co-Founders: Hope Ndhlovu and Bahlakoana Mabetha.

Hope Ndhlovu (CEO) 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 and Data Science to solve challenges faced by people back home. Hope is a full stack Software Developer. He is proficient in programming languages that include Java, JavaScript, SQL, HTML and CSS. He has experience working with Spring Boot, MySQL, Amazon Cloud Services, Microsoft Azure and Android Development.

Bahlakoana Mabetha (CTO), holds a B.S. in Electrical Engineering from Harvard University. He is currently studying a PHD in Power Electronics at Dartmouth University in Hanover, USA. Bahlakoana brings in a set of technical skills that include C, JavaScript, Python, Java, SQL and circuit design. Bahla was born and raised in Lesotho, before receiving a scholarship to study at Harvard University.

We both grew up in Southern Africa. Before receiving a full scholarship to study at Harvard University, Hope Ndhlovu grew up commuting to public high school in Bulawayo, Zimbabwe. He was late to school almost every day as a result of an inefficient Public Transport System. Both Co-Founders grew up around inefficient Public Transport. We understand this problem intimately and we have a vested interest in solving challenges.

RevRoad an Accelerator program from Provo, Utah, is currently our adviser. They are offering an assortment of services to our company, that include Legal, Finance and Strategy, etc. They are helping us setting up our operations in Zimbabwe for a relatively low price.

To be financially sustainable we have a B2B business model. We charge Public Transport Operators for tickets sold on our app. To understand our business model, we have broken down the various pricing models we will use before.

 The average cost of an Intercity trip that is roughly 340km long 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 that is 20km long 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 day. Charging 10% per Taxi trip, we will be generating about US$15 of revenue from Taxi Operators per vehicle per day. 

We have so far raised US$31000 in non-dilutive funding from grants and pitch competition. This funding has enabled our team to work on product development, customer validation and product market. We plan to continue financing our company in the short term through applying for grants like the Global Innovation Fund and USAID DIV Fund. Grants and pitch competitions are a short-term method of financing.  We hope to raise capital from Angel Funds and Venture Capital starting with a pre-seed round of funding. We are hoping to raise a Series A round of funding in 18 months. Revenue is the most stable source of financing for our company in the long term. We currently have 30 Public Transport Operators in Bulawayo. As we scale our company so will our revenue.

We are currently raising $150K in a pre-seed round on funding that will finance our company for 18 months. Being selected can help us full our fundraising goals for the next 12 months. We hope to get valuable support from ServiceNow that includes restructuring our business model and distributing our products and services and scaling our product all over Africa.

We have a public beta app at the moment and we are launching in early April 2020. There are several pieces of the whole app ecosystem that includes a sophisticated admin dashboard. We are hoping to receive technical advice on how to go about this.

In order to accelerate our growth in African countries we are looking forward to working with Telecommunications companies, Local Authorities, and Public Transport Unions.

Since we are launching in Zimbabwe, we hope to work with Telecommunications companies like Econet Wireless Zimbabwe (The biggest telecom in Zimbabwe). Econet Wireless can help drive down the cost of mobile data for commuter and Operators, ensuring that they use a very helpful service like Tuverl at no extra cost.

For the Tuverl app to work smoothly we need a lot of data about Public Transport Infrastructure that might be missing on Google Maps. For example, GPS coordinates of bus stops and maps of the various routes with any given city. Local Authorities are important partners in gathering that data. We hope to be working with the Bulawayo City Council to ensure we collect and digitize all the data about bus routes.

Public Transport Operators in the city of Bulawayo are self-organized into lobbying groups that are loosely called Unions. Partnering with Unions will help ease our customer acquisition of Public Transport Operators. We hope to work with Unions like Tshova Mubaiwa, Bulawayo City Transit and Bulawayo Public Transport Association.