TEF Ignition 2026 · Bocconi University

The jury asked eight questions. Here are our answers.

The evening before, zhol tells freight planners which of tomorrow’s shipments a ban, closure, strike or stopped ferry will hit, and what to do. One WhatsApp message.

See the answersTry the beta
Full documents and code: github.com/bashpayy-hash/Zhol (docs/ and zhol/)

Tap a question for its three numbers. Every number has a source; what we still assume is marked.

Question 1 · Market

€230M a year lost in Europe to bans, closures and queues

  • €230M a year in Europe: what delays from bans, closures and queues cost freight planners
  • €18.6M of it we can serve from Italy: 6,050 offices with weekly lanes abroad
  • €0.77M a year by year 3: 250 paying offices, about 4% of them
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Question 2 · Pricing

€12 per vehicle a month: 14% of what it saves

  • €1,740 a month: what an office with 20 vehicles saves, at the €100 hour Italian law sets
  • 14% of that saving is our price: €12 per vehicle a month, minimum €99
  • €8 per vehicle for the first 10 offices, 12 months, for a weekly 15 minutes of feedback
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Question 3 · Model

92% gross margin at 100 offices

  • 92% gross margin at 100 offices: every office on the same roads shares one set of events
  • €155k of funding to break even, in May 2029
  • €771k a year of revenue in year 3, from €35k in year 1
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Question 4 · Go-to-market

≈2,350 offices in the North, a day trip from Milan

  • ≈2,350 offices in the North to start with: a day trip from Milan, sold in Italian
  • 92 companies and 87 people already named from public sources
  • 4 pilots of four weeks, measured against the office’s own process
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Question 5 · Tech

7 countries of ban rules already in code

  • 7 countries of ban rules in code, plus the official Tyrol dosing calendar
  • AI reads notices and news; one person approves every event before it goes out
  • 1 WhatsApp message per office per evening, with each option priced
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Question 6 · Evidence

8 interviews by 13 November, with stop criteria

  • 8 interviews by 13 November, against seven hypotheses with stop criteria
  • 2 offices share last month’s loads; we replay what zhol would have flagged
  • 2 live tests on real restriction days, with the dispatcher’s verdict
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Question 7 · Competition

0 tools today warn the evening before about tomorrow’s loads

  • 6 categories of tools, each covering a piece: TMS, telematics, freight exchanges, visibility, risk platforms, associations
  • 0 of them check tomorrow’s loads the evening before
  • €10–35 per vehicle a month is what telematics costs today; we add to it, we do not replace it
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Question 8 · Room

2–3 years of window for a focused wedge

  • 2–3 years of window for a focused wedge in a fragmented market
  • What lasts: the verified history of events and their effect on real loads
  • Who could follow: a TMS can add alerts, but not verified, multilingual events across seven countries
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Why not just have someone check?

People check in office hours. Disruptions do not keep them.

1

Today: a person, now and then

Someone checks the news and the ban calendars between other work, in office hours. Strikes are called in the evening, closures start at 5 a.m., ferries stop at night.

2

zhol: every day, weekends too

The radar reads the news in four languages, the official calendars and the weather at the passes, and the evening message lands before the office closes.

3

Next: offices warn each other

A driver stuck at Kufstein at 4 a.m., a queue at the Messina ferries: one tap on WhatsApp, confirmed by a second report or a source, and every office with loads there knows. Anonymous. The more offices, the earlier everyone knows.

Idea we test in the pilots
Why this matters, from the field

Road restrictions cost freight money every day

€544M

a year: what Tyrol’s Brenner restrictions and the Luegbrücke works cost Italy (Uniontrasporti; €463M of it freight)

21 of 57

dosing days at Kufstein in 2025 came outside the published calendar (Land Tirol, ADAC)

€400M+

lost in eight days of blockades in southern Italy, October 2026 (tally from regional estimates)

The Sicily stoppage, the Kufstein trap and the message that would have helped

One team, from Kazakhstan, in Milan

Alikhan, Inkara and Tomiris, friends since our first year at Bocconi. Now in Milan, next to the offices we build for. Zhol means road.

Alikhan

Customer discovery

Interviews dispatchers and owners. Recruits the first offices.

Inkara

Workflow and prototype

Matches events to loads. Designs review and confirmation.

Tomiris

Pilots and measurement

Runs supervised cases. Tracks outcomes, time and costs.

The beta is open

Send us tomorrow’s loads. We tell you tonight which ones a restriction will hit.

Four weeks, free, for traffic offices with lanes over the Alps. Every alert is checked by a person and cites its source.

Join the betaSee it on real roads
Illustration: a folded map on a dark desk with a route over the Alps, three delivery cards and a phone showing one message
First step with any office: review one recent disruption with a dispatcher and the owner, in 30 minutes.