TESSERA
The empty map as a starting gun
Most cycling apps measure what you already did. Tessera does the opposite: it shows you where you have never been, and lets that emptiness do the work.
You draw the challenge
Pick any area in the world and decide for yourself how big it gets.
White space pulls
Import your ride history. What is left is white - and that is where you want to go.
A challenge measured in years
Three levels, from your own region to a whole country. You will not fill this in one summer.
Tessera is not about the roads you already know. It is about the white space left over. Pick a region anywhere in the world and see it laid out blank. Every municipality you have not been to yet pulls at you. You end up riding places you would otherwise only have seen if chance took you there - not because an app told you to, but because you made that reason yourself.
The problem: exploring waits for a reason
Riders do explore. Almost always because something else takes them there: a holiday, a club ride, family in another part of the country. Live in Bristol and you will ride in the Cairngorms sooner or later - if the opportunity comes along.
Without a prompt like that, the regular loop wins. Not out of laziness, but because nothing makes you take that particular turn. Training apps do not help: they measure power, heart rate and recovery, all of it data about the ride you were going to do anyway.
Tessera manufactures the prompt. You put it there on your own initiative, and after that it works just as well as a holiday does.
You draw the area, not us
Tessera starts with a map you draw yourself. Pick a region - your province, your country, the area you are going on holiday - and Tessera divides it into municipalities. At the start, almost all of it is white.
Then you import your history: Strava, Intervals.icu, a GPX file, up to ten years of rides in one go. That is not a scoreboard, it is a baseline. It shows honestly where you have actually been. And then you find out how small that area really is.
From that moment it works on its own. Every white municipality is a reason to turn left instead of right.
Three levels, years of work
A challenge you finish in one summer is not a challenge. So Tessera works in three levels, from your own region to a whole country, and you decide how hard you start.
It also means the map stays with you for years. You do not tick it off, you build it up. A municipality you first rode in 2024 is still there in 2031, with the date on it.
Where it is going
Tessera is platform-agnostic: it works with any GPS device, because it cares where you were, not which brand you bought. Garmin and Wahoo are planned.
It is also the first part of Project Teneo, and is built modular to fit it. Where Cycling Commons maps the world, Tessera keeps track of which part of that world you invited yourself into - without the Commons ever learning anything about you.
You draw your area. It is completely empty. And that is what decides where you ride next week.