A 19-year-old Thiel Fellow has raised $7.3 million in seed funding to broaden Swoop, an African “tremendous app” technique that begins with meals supply in Lagos, Nigeria.
Aubrey Niederhoffer, who dropped out of the College of California, Berkeley, has relocated to Lagos the place his startup Swoop has launched a meals supply platform backed by Lengthy Journey Ventures, Variant, Model One, Dune Ventures and Soma Capital. The corporate has 28 staff.
Swoop is positioning itself as greater than a supply service, with plans to broaden into funds and different client companies because it seeks to construct an built-in “tremendous app” for African markets.
“In Africa, there’s no legacy banking infrastructure. You’re competing with different fintechs. Basically, you’re not competing with bank cards,” Niederhoffer stated. “These aren’t in style, and there’s big alternative.”
The Thiel Fellowship, based by investor Peter Thiel in 2011, offers $250,000 grants to younger entrepreneurs who depart formal schooling to construct firms. Previous recipients embrace Figma co-founder Dylan Subject and Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin.
Niederhoffer stated his curiosity in African markets started in his early teenagers after enjoying the net geography recreation GeoGuessr. At 15, he based a recruitment firm centered on Eswatini and later visited the nation throughout faculty breaks.
After enrolling at Berkeley, he later dropped out to give attention to Swoop, which first launched in Eswatini earlier than relocating operations to Lagos in 2025. The corporate rebuilt its expertise stack utilizing AI-assisted improvement instruments forward of its newest product rollout.
The startup is presently onboarding eating places and increasing its supply community in Lagos. Niederhoffer stated the corporate continues to be testing operational challenges, together with efficiency underneath antagonistic climate circumstances.
Swoop’s long-term ambition is to comply with the mannequin of Asian “tremendous apps” resembling WeChat, which mix messaging, funds and market companies inside a single platform.
