A 19-Year-Old Drops Out of Berkeley, Moves to Lagos, and Raises $7.3 Million to Build Africa’s Super App

Aubrey Niederhoffer should be halfway through his sophomore year at UC Berkeley right now. Instead, he is in Lagos, running a 28-person startup, freshly named to the Thiel Fellowship, and sitting on $7.3 million in seed funding.

Niederhoffer’s startup, Swoop, has officially launched its food delivery operations in Yaba — a densely populated neighbourhood on the Lagos Mainland — marking a high-stakes market entry into a sector that recently saw the exits of heavily backed international players like Jumia Food and Bolt Food, but also the rise of local heavyweight Chowdeck. 

The round was backed by a syndicate of Silicon Valley and Africa-focused investors including Long Journey, Variant, Version One, Dune Ventures, Soma Capital — which previously backed Nigerian unicorn Moniepoint — and Zero Knowledge Ventures. The Thiel Fellowship, founded by billionaire investor Peter Thiel in 2011, grants young people $250,000 to leave college and build new things, counting among its alumni Figma CEO Dylan Field and Ethereum co-creator Vitalik Buterin.

Niederhoffer’s connection to Africa started unconventionally: playing the online geography game GeoGuessr as a tween. By 15, he had launched a recruiting company focused on Eswatini’s labour pool. In August 2025, after his freshman year at Berkeley, he co-founded Swoop in Eswatini alongside Edwin Ruiz. The platform acquired 6,000 users in its first month, which prompted Niederhoffer to drop out, accept the Thiel Fellowship, and relocate the team to Lagos to target a vastly larger addressable market.

Food delivery is only ever meant to be the opening move. Niederhoffer takes inspiration from Asian super apps like WeChat and Kaspi, which became the default layer for marketplace services, payments, and everyday life. Africa’s lack of legacy banking infrastructure, he argues, makes it uniquely suited for this kind of layered platform — the fintech competition is with other digital players, not entrenched credit card networks. “In Africa, there’s no legacy banking infrastructure. You’re competing with other fintechs. Essentially, you’re not competing with credit cards,” he said. “Those are not popular, and there’s huge opportunity.” 

Swoop’s Nigerian country manager Demola Adesina framed the strategy plainly: food delivery is a measure of how developed the ecosystem is, and getting it right positions the company to become the central node around which other services — groceries, ride-hailing, financial products — can eventually be built. He also clarified that Swoop is not positioning itself as a rival to Chowdeck’s existing users, but is going after the much larger pool of Nigerians who are not yet ordering food online at all.

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 through restaurant commissions and a 7 per cent customer handling fee, kept deliberately low to prioritise user acquisition. 

The app was rebuilt from scratch using AI tools before its Lagos launch. Niederhoffer has acknowledged there are still unknowns to navigate — including, simply, how the service performs in a Lagos rainstorm.