Our Story: How ZERO•ONE Was Built

One sentence in a sports physiology paper stopped me.

“The horse is a professional athlete.”

I knew it was true. But a second question followed right behind it: if that’s true, why can’t we see what’s happening inside its body while it performs?

I was a physiologist, drawn to one thing above all: relationships. No system in the body means anything in isolation. That belief became the seed of everything ZERO•ONE would become.

In 2017, at the University of Tehran, I began researching equine exercise physiology alone. My thesis examined jumping intensity as an inflammatory stimulus on the immune system of show jumping horses. I chose show jumping because it wasn’t simple: power, endurance, coordination, and recovery, all demanded at once. If I could understand an athlete that complex, I believed I could understand almost anything.

In 2020, I brought that research into the field with Maziar Jamshidkhani and his club, Jam. Maziar gave me more than horses. He gave me a rider’s instinct, helped shape my early protocols, and grounded me in what a horse’s body actually does, not just what a test predicts. He said one thing constantly:

“A horse is not a machine.”

I didn’t fully believe him at first. My plan was standardization: one protocol, applied consistently, so results could be compared. It sounded rigorous.

It wasn’t. By 2021, the standardized approach had failed in the field. Every horse’s condition, history, and response were different enough that forcing one protocol onto all of them produced noise, not answers.

That failure changed the question. Instead of what test should we run on everyone, I started asking, for each horse: what do we need to understand about this one?

Through 2021 and 2022, working the arena alongside a rider, Agha Zia, who ran every test with me, I stopped looking at numbers one at a time and started looking at what happened between them. A pattern would appear across several indicators that didn’t exist in any single one alone.

That’s where the idea moved past “testing.” I wanted to make a horse’s physiology visible, and I wanted whatever we saw to become an actual training decision, not just a report. Alireza Rajabinejad helped turn the raw numbers into structured charts and statistics. Dr. Mehdi Nematpour gave limited but valuable nutrition consultation. Fatemeh Yari was steady support through the hardest, most uncertain stretch, when I couldn’t always explain, even to myself, exactly what I was building.

In August 2022, that years-long path finally had a name: ZERO•ONE, building something out of nothing.

We started with show jumping horses at 145–150cm. In the shortest time possible, at that year’s national championship, both horses we had became champions.

The deeper I went, the clearer one truth became: performance doesn’t come from maximizing a single capacity. A horse at average capacity, perfectly balanced across its systems, can outperform a horse that’s exceptional in one area but misaligned in the rest.

Best does not mean maximum. Best means balanced.

That single principle, discovered, not decided, became the foundation of everything that followed.

Even a precise, rigorous report left trainers asking: “Okay, now what do I actually do with this horse?” An analysis that can’t become a training decision has lost most of its value. That became my real work: finding relationships others saw separately, and turning a complex system into one clear direction.

What I actually wanted went further than a report. I wanted to simplify physiology the way art simplifies a feeling: to take an entire athlete’s potential and draw it into a single image, simple enough to read in seconds, beautiful enough to want to look at twice. Not a chart that explains the science. A picture that is the science, made visible.

In 2023, that idea became a results sheet: one simple image, two years in the making. I never built it alone. Narges Shabanehgard worked with me through the entire process, turning physiological relationships into charts and refining them until the visual could carry what I meant it to carry.

The chart now on the site was finished in 2026. I built the underlying ideas, numbers, and analysis myself and hand-drew the first version; Narges Shabanehgard designed it; Ali Farhadi implemented it on the website as a three-dimensional chart. Every horse has a physiological identity: not a rank, not a label, just a pattern unique to itself. We found the pattern first. The numbers came after.

Years of work across hundreds of horses in Iran showed the change was real. Then ZERO•ONE moved beyond it: first Oman, then the UAE, where I met stables with no shortage of equipment or data, and still the same gap. Having information isn’t the same as understanding it.

Private and royal stables also had constraints I hadn’t faced before: access, confidentiality, ownership of data. A trainer holding all that information still wasn’t an analyst. That’s when ZERO•ONE’s future became clear: we didn’t need to be physically present beside every horse. If a stable could gather its own data, we could be the layer that understands it. One trainer put it simply: “Just give me a few simple points.” That became the platform, not tied to one device, built to travel from horse to horse, stable to stable, country to country.

The hero of this story was never the technology. It was always the horse. I don’t believe in a “bad athlete,” only one that hasn’t yet been understood correctly, or hasn’t found the environment where its balance can show.

I’m still following the same question from 2017. If a horse is a professional athlete, we should be able to see it, not only from the outside but inside its body. And we owe a trainer the one thing they can’t get back: time.

I’m not the creator of ZERO•ONE. It already existed. Building it is what turned me into a creator.

ZERO•ONE wasn’t born in a day, and it wasn’t born in a business plan. It took shape over years, between research and the field, between data and experience.