TAKUM wins UF AI Days Pitch Competition

TAKUM, an AI-powered cost control tool designed for airlines, was awarded first place in this year’s UF AI Days Pitch Competition. The platform analyzes and screens invoices to identify and flag overcharges, enabling carriers to recover funds and reduce unnecessary spending.

Founders Imsulen “Allen” Jamir (MBA ’26), Réka Holicsek (MBA ’26) and Samuel Frempong (MBA ’26) are in the same MBA cohort and are friends outside of the program.

Jamir came up with the idea for TAKUM after interning for a Bain Capital-backed start-up airline company in the Dominican Republic.

“During my internship, I found $1.4 million in credit overcharges [by] going through invoices manually,” Jamir explained. “That’s when I realized ‘we might have a problem here’ [and] that they need[ed] a scalable solution.”

When Jamir approached Holicsek and Frempong with the idea, Holicsek suggested the team compete in the UF AI Days Pitch Competition.

Holicsek learned about the competition three years ago, when she was an exchange student from Hungary at the University of Florida. At the time, Fire Neural Network, which was founded by fellow Hungarian students, won the UF AI Days Pitch competition.

The trio worked together to apply their various business and cultural backgrounds to form TAKUM.

Frempong, who serves as TAKUM’s CFO, has over a decade of experience working in the energy, oil and gas field in a financial role in Sub Saharan Africa.

Holicsek, who serves as TAKUM’s CMO, has international experience working in the marketing and sales industry in Austria.

Jamir, who serves as the CEO, has previous experience working in operations and is originally from Nagaland in northeast India. In Chungli Ao, Jamir’s native language, “takum” means life.

“We want to give life to the airline industry, where a lot of [smaller airlines] go bankrupt because of the thin razor margins they have,” he explained.

Competing in the UF AI Days Pitch Competition was especially meaningful for the trio, as international students contributing to the entrepreneurial ecosystem at the University of Florida.

“We’re coming in from all different parts of the world,” Jamir said. “Having [our] idea validated by experts in the room [means] so much to us [on a personal level].”

The students would like to thank their management team and advisors who supported their work with TAKUM, including Christopher Pryor, Jim Hoover, Lindy Archambeau, Michael Carrillo, Jingchuan Pu, Diego Geronimo Cier, Julie Fisher, Kevin Fisher and Cloe Carmery.

“Thank you to the MBA program for bringing us together and for this opportunity to help students build real solutions to problems,” Jamir said.

Jamie Kraft is the director of the UF Entrepreneurship and Innovation Center.

“TAKUM did a great job conveying a compelling vision regarding the opportunity that they uncovered and the need in the marketplace,” said Kraft. “They clearly outlined their business model and what the planned revenue streams would like in the coming years, and they demonstrated strong knowledge of the gaps in the industry through description of a business case.”

All top four teams took home a $5,000 Luby Microgrant, including:

• Align – An intelligent task and time organizer designed to reduce cognitive load and make scheduling instant.
• Clevika – An AI tutoring platform.
• Dominion – An AI powered intelligence firm that provides real estate developers with a decisive market advantage.

The TAKUM team plans to use the funds from the microgrant to cover the operating costs of the platform and to work on developing a prototype.

The competition is presented by the Entrepreneurship and Innovation Center within the Warrington College of Business.

“UF AI Days provides students with an experiential activity in which they can compete against their peers, receive feedback from advisors, mentors and judges, gain notoriety through press feedback and social media, and, ultimately, receive grant funding in order to support further growth and development of the company,” said Kraft.