Tell us about your idea: what, how, why?

Tracfo is an AI co-pilot for international graduates in Germany. You will paste in a job ad, and it will tell you where you stand before you send the application. It is in development, and the free closed beta opens in September 2026.

Being specific about what it shows you. It reads the job ad against your profile and sorts every requirement into four groups. What you already have. What is partly there, but not visible the way this employer reads it. What is missing. And what is a hard blocker you cannot move right now. Each one comes with a reason and one step to take next.

It will also help with the German CV and the Anschreiben, the German cover letter. Many people arriving here have never written either one. And it will keep everything in one application tracker, so you know who you wrote to and when.

Why. International graduates arrive qualified and then have to learn a job market that runs on rules nobody writes down. The layout of a German CV is a rule. Which requirements are real and which are only preferences is a rule. Most people learn those by guessing, one rejection at a time. Tracfo is there to make them visible from the start.

If your project were an animal, which one would it be and why?

A honeyguide. It is a small bird in Africa that leads people to wild honey. It does not open the hive, and it does not eat for you. It knows where the thing is, it calls until you follow, and it waits when you fall behind. It will not leave you alone until you look.

That is Tracfo.

What motivated you to start your own project or company?

I came to Germany from South Asia and studied at the European University Viadrina. Then I went through the job search in Germany myself. I thought the work would be the hard part. It was not. The hard part was that nobody tells you anything.

You send an application. Nothing comes back. No reason, no line, nothing to fix. So you guess. You change something at random and send the next one, and the next one. After enough of those you are not learning anymore. You are just getting quieter.

The first time I saw a real German CV, I did not know the layout itself was a rule.

I cannot change who a company picks in the end. That is the employer’s decision. But I can change everything that happens before you press send. So I started building Tracfo.

How did your impact journey begin?

It did not begin as impact. It began as a product. Before Tracfo I was building software for companies, on the paperwork side of hiring from abroad. I interviewed about twelve people who would have had to pay for it. I wanted to hear that the problem was worth paying to solve. By the eighth interview I knew I was not going to hear it, so I stopped building it.

Then Tracfo was chosen as a finalist for the Social Impact Award 2026, and the questions changed. Not how big is the market. Who is this for. On a call I heard myself answer. No money for a coach. Nobody at home who has done this before.

Saying it out loud changed the project. It is not about the price. It is that the same information the well connected already get, quietly and for nothing, should reach somebody who does not know anybody. That is not charity. Charity wants you to be grateful. You keep your dignity when nobody is doing you a favour.

What have you been most excited about so far in the incubation?

Being told what was wrong with my work. That sounds like a strange thing to enjoy. My mentor decides for a living which features get built and which get cut. In one call he took my pitch apart. He pointed at a section and said it was there to sound good, not because it was true. He was right. That is what Tracfo will be, from the other side of the table. Honest instead of polite. Nobody had given me that call before.

Then there was the filming day in Vienna. I asked a few people how many jobs they had applied for. The answers ran from single figures to a couple of hundred. Then I asked how many of those had turned into an interview. Those numbers were far smaller, and for some of them there were none at all. Until then I thought it was me.

Next is Berlin in October, then the beta in the hands of international graduates in Germany.

If you had all the resources in the world, what would you change in the world?

I would make the honest answer free. Not only in hiring. Anywhere somebody decides something about your life and does not tell you why. A visa office. A landlord. A hiring manager. They are allowed to say no. But you should be told what the no was about, and one thing you could do differently. Not a copy and paste rejection. One real sentence, written by somebody who actually looked. It costs a few minutes at the end of a process that already took weeks, and it lets a person try again on Monday.

And I would want people to be able to stay in the country where they built a life. Two in three international students want to stay after they graduate. That is the DAAD’s number, the German Academic Exchange Service, not mine. Whether they can stay is mostly not up to them. There is not much dignity in waiting to find out.

What has been the biggest challenge so far?

Saying out loud that it is not ready. Over and over, to people who would like to see a demo.

Tracfo is still being built. No users, no numbers to show. Community voting is coming, and a film with a working product in it is easier to make than one without. I could have recorded a demo of something that does not exist. People do that.

I decided early that I will not. So it stays in development, and I keep saying so. Conversations go quiet the second I say there is nothing to click yet. I do not know what that will cost me when the voting opens.

Your catchphrase

People are rarely missing ability. They are missing somebody who will tell them what to fix.