Afrigather “Our overarching aim is to get transport in and out of Africa as easy as reserving an Uber or Airbnb,” Moses Enenwali, founder and CEO of Topship, a Nigerian logistics startup digitising Africa’s transport skills, instructed TechCabal over a name.
That’s an formidable assertion from a firm that changed into working handiest on Instagram factual 18 months prior to now.
On January 14, the firm announced that it bought into the 2022 Chilly weather Batch of Y Combinator (YC) and has up to this point its LinkedIn profile title to embody “(YC W22)”—a signature id tag for YC companies.
YC brings validation to companies it backs and, moreover, the accelerator’s long-established $125K funding—now $500K—the programme exposes startups to world attention, high-level strategic advice, and a lifetime of high-networth connections.
Nonetheless how did an Instagram substitute pivot into turning into a tech startup after which get into YC, the sphere’s largest accelerator programme with a 1.5% acceptance rate?
For Enenwali, it’s the culmination of years of toiling as an employee and months of aggressive legwork as a founder.
The scramble began in 2014 after Enenwali returned to Nigeria from the UK and went straight into the busy world of consulting at Ernst & Younger, the build he would work for nearly a year and a half prior to moving on to Africa Courier Snarl (ACE), a Lagos-basically based fully logistics substitute founded by a co-founder of Jumia and Lidya, Tunde Kehinde. At ACE, Enenwali changed into a senior client manager.
Even though the role changed into his first reliable job in logistics, it wasn’t his first skills in the sphere. Lend a hand in university, Enenwali had traipse an aspect substitute called Timewall Firm, the build he imported and distributed coffee beans sourced from Plateau Snort, Nigeria, in the UK.
After ACE, he joined one other logistics startup Sendbox, a YC-backed Nigerian firm that supplies deliveries for e-commerce and social commerce sellers locally and internationally. Enenwali spent over 4 years at Sendbox and wore hundreds of hats in conjunction with growth, product, and partnerships. By the time he stop to focal point on constructing Topship, he changed into already fully exposed to the fragmented nature of transport to and from Africa.
“I spoke to hundreds of people and realised that no longer a single person has had a relaxing transport skills [to and fro Africa]. The complaints were majorly spherical transparency, loss or harm of orders, space of gaining access to transport products and companies, ridiculous pricing, and heavy customs responsibilities,” stated Enenwali.
So, in June 2020, Enenwali started Topship as a one-man shop, opened an Instagram fable and commenced helping folk to transfer parcels locally. Then he started reaching out to retailers transport inner and former Africa. He’d moreover discuss over with retailers bodily to prospect them.
COVID disrupted hundreds of issues and logistics changed into one among the industries that took the heaviest blow. So, leveraging on this gap to present folk precise transport provides changed into Enenwali’s trump card.
“It changed into a advanced enterprise nonetheless no longer an very no longer going one,” he stated.
Turning into a tech startup
Topship persevered to construct traction below the radar; overjoyed customers referred their friends and acquaintances to this novel Instagram platform helping of us to ship seamlessly.
This persevered till March final year when Enenwali had a determined clutch of the synthetic’s spend case and idea he would possibly possibly diagram a Flexport for Africans. Nonetheless to be Africa’s Flexport, Topship needed to be a bulky know-how firm, so Enenwali determined to diagram instrument that handles the raze-to-raze process. The firm then raised $300K pre-seed, brought in Junaid Babatunde as co-founder and CTO, and built a limited team that can whisk up its digital transformation.
Topship now has a internet app that permits retailers and people to e book a door-to-door shipment. It has moreover prolonged its transport choices from handiest parcels to embody cargos and freight to and from wherever on this planet.
Since launching, Enenwali stated the firm has onboarded over 1,800 customers, and 700 of them are active businesses which were vetted and verified. These businesses on a typical basis spend Topship for their native and world shipment. The final customers are mostly particular person customers who handiest form one-time transport, or ship at intervals. Enenwali moreover mentioned that the firm has performed 7,000 shipments and is in the intervening time declaring a 100% year-on-year growth rate.
On revenue, Enenwali stated the firm has 3 sources of profits: it sells transport insurance to its customers; prices a markup rate on every transaction; and moreover prices for clearing customs when appropriate.
Topship is no longer the handiest African tech startup looking to digitise the transport skills: there are a pair of them in conjunction with Kenyan’s Sote, Nigerian MVX, OnePort 365, the CEO’s susceptible employer Sendbox, and more. Nonetheless Enenwali doesn’t stare them as competitors; to him they’re doable partners. He believes this legacy sector is one mountainous broken big that can defend shut a complete village to repair. So, all people constructing in that rental is contributing to the underlying infrastructure foremost for mass adoption.
“We’re no longer competing in opposition to any startup because, belief me, no one has all of it realized. We’re all competing in opposition to the hot dilapidated plan of moving goods to and from Africa,” Enenweli stated when requested about competitors. “We are in the intervening time constructing an infrastructure and, when we’re carried out, tech startups that are looking to clear up the identical space would possibly possibly have the option to hasten into what we’ve built and attend their customers.”
The Topship team understands that to dispute their mountainous opinion to fruition, it has to prefer hundreds of third events at every stop in the worth chain. There’s hundreds of manual heavy lifting happening on the encourage of the scenes that wants to be handled by partners. Enenwali confirmed that to form a trustworthy raze-to-raze seamless skills, they contain partnered with hundreds of stakeholders across the sphere and, now, its customers can ship globally.
Even though the firm keeps experimenting and arriving at diversified iterations of its solution, the CEO believes that if Flexport can form it, Topship, too, can.
Flexport, the San Francisco-basically based fully transport big, changed into portion of the YC 2014 Chilly weather Batch and went on to develop $20 million after graduation. In 2020, it generated $1.7 billion in revenue.
It’s obvious Topship is admittedly going all-in on its adoption of the Flexport model; it’s already a tech-enabled substitute and in YC, factual worship Flexport. Nonetheless will it scale and develop $20 million? Only time will express. In the meantime, what’s certain is Enenwali’s passion and confidence about fixing the broken transport chain for Africans.
