A 19-year-old Thiel Fellow has raised $7.3 million in seed funding to expand Swoop, an African “super app” strategy that begins with food delivery in Lagos, Nigeria.
Aubrey Niederhoffer, who dropped out of the University of California, Berkeley, has relocated to Lagos where his startup Swoop has launched a food delivery platform backed by Long Journey Ventures, Variant, Version One, Dune Ventures and Soma Capital. The company has 28 employees.
Swoop is positioning itself as more than a delivery service, with plans to expand into payments and other consumer services as it seeks to build an integrated “super app” for African markets.
“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.”
The Thiel Fellowship, founded by investor Peter Thiel in 2011, provides $250,000 grants to young entrepreneurs who leave formal education to build companies. Past recipients include Figma co-founder Dylan Field and Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin.
Niederhoffer said his interest in African markets began in his early teens after playing the online geography game GeoGuessr. At 15, he founded a recruitment company focused on Eswatini and later visited the country during school breaks.
After enrolling at Berkeley, he later dropped out to focus on Swoop, which first launched in Eswatini before relocating operations to Lagos in 2025. The company rebuilt its technology stack using AI-assisted development tools ahead of its latest product rollout.
The startup is currently onboarding restaurants and expanding its delivery network in Lagos. Niederhoffer said the company is still testing operational challenges, including performance under adverse weather conditions.
Swoop’s long-term ambition is to follow the model of Asian “super apps” such as WeChat, which combine messaging, payments and marketplace services within a single platform.
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