If he hadn’t dropped out, Aubrey Niederhoffer would be nearing the end of his sophomore year at UC Berkeley. Instead, the 19-year-old from the New York area is living in Lagos, where he just launched his food delivery app, Swoop. The 28-person company just booked $7.3 million in seed funding, and the teenager was named to the prestigious Thiel Fellowship.
Swoop, which drew funding from Long Journey, Variant, Version One, Dune Ventures, and Soma Capital, has ambitions far bigger than food delivery. The company’s young founder plans to release a payment app and other services in a bid to create a super app for Africa—a continent that is young, growing, and flooded with mobile phones.
