A 19-year-old founder who left the University of California, Berkeley and relocated to Lagos has raised $7.3 million to build Swoop, a super app targeting Africa’s vast underserved digital market.
- A 19-year-old founder who left the University of California, Berkeley and relocated to Lagos has raised $7.3 million to build...
- On April 23, 2026, Fortune confirmed that Aubrey Niederhoffer secured a $7.3 million seed round and was named to the...
- After his first year at Berkeley, he co-founded Swoop in Eswatini alongside Edwin Ruiz.
- Niederhoffer sees Africa’s banking gap as an advantage, not a barrier.
Keep reading for the full breakdown on $7.3 million seed — everything you need to know is covered below.
On April 23, 2026, Fortune confirmed that Aubrey Niederhoffer secured a $7.3 million seed round and was named to the Thiel Fellowship to build the venture, underscoring growing global investor interest in African technology opportunities.
From Eswatini startup to Lagos super app: The rise of Swoop
Niederhoffer grew interested in Africa while playing the online geography game GeoGuessr as a tween. When he was 15, he started a recruiting company focused on the labour pool in Eswatini and would visit the southern African country during school breaks.
RelatedPosts
That early exposure shaped a founder with rare on-the-ground instincts. After his first year at Berkeley, he co-founded Swoop in Eswatini alongside Edwin Ruiz. The platform acquired 6,000 users in its first month, prompting Niederhoffer to drop out, accept the Thiel Fellowship and relocate the team to Lagos to target a vastly larger addressable market.
Niederhoffer said he identified a structural shift in opportunity over time.
“Over time, I realised that the largest opportunities in many African countries weren’t in exports, they were in domestic markets,” he said.
Swoop’s super app vision and the fintech opportunity
Food delivery is only the opening move for Swoop. The company’s long-term plan folds in payments, groceries and ride-hailing across the continent, modelled after Asian super apps like Kaspi and WeChat, which used high-frequency consumer transactions to build daily usage habits that made financial services sticky.
Niederhoffer sees Africa’s banking gap as an advantage, not a barrier.
“In Africa, there’s no legacy banking infrastructure. You’re competing with other fintechs. Essentially, you’re not competing with credit cards,” Niederhoffer said. “Those are not popular, and there’s huge opportunity.”
To avoid the cost structures that have sunk previous food delivery businesses on the continent, Swoop operates on an asset-light model, using independent riders who retain 100 per cent of their delivery fees. Revenue currently comes from restaurant commissions and a 7 per cent customer handling fee, deliberately kept low to prioritise user acquisition.
Swoop’s Nigerian country manager, Demola Adesina said:
“Our target is not existing consumption, but the users that are not consuming. We are not getting into a war with other platforms. We are trying to grow the pie.”
The $7.3 million round was backed by Long Journey and Variant, with additional participation from Version One, Dune Ventures, Soma Capital, Zero Knowledge Ventures, Base Capital and Walter Kortschak. Niederhoffer also credited team members Justin Liu, Demola Adesina and Sourabh Singh for their contribution to the company’s early growth phase.
With Swoop now live in Yaba and a 28-person team pushing product expansion, the company is positioning itself as one of the startups to watch in Africa’s evolving super app race. Whether it can become a dominant platform remains to be seen, but investors are clearly betting on the possibility.
Comments 1