Apple Inc. Buys Nigerian Born Chinedu Echeruo’s Hopstop.com For $1 Billion
The Wall Street Journal's publication, AllThingsDigital
reports. Founded in 2005, HopStop.com makes
mobile applications for both iOS and Android that
covers over 300 cities and that helps people get
directions or find nearby subway stations and bus
stops. Terms of the deal have not been disclosed as
at the time of this publication.
Chinedu Echeruo, formerly an analyst at investment
banks and hedge funds founded HopStop in 2005.
Echeruo is now Chairman of the Board for HopStop.
HopStop has oft been compared to Israel's Waze
which was recently acquired by Google for $1 billion.
The move is seen as Apple's plan to bolster its map
offering especially given Google's recent acquisition
of Waze.
A serial entrepreneur, Chinedu Echeruo grew up in
Eastern Nigeria and attended Kings College, Lagos.
He attended Syracuse University and the Harvard
Business School in the United States and founded
HopStop.com after working for several years in the
Mergers & Acquisitions and Leveraged Finance
groups of J.P Morgan Chase where he was involved
in a broad range of M&A, Financing and Private
Equity transactions.
He also worked at AM Investment Partners, a $500
million volatility-driven convertible bond arbitrage
hedge fund.
He founded and raised nearly $8 million for his two
U.S based internet companies; Hopstop.com
andTripology.com. Tripology.com was acquired in
2010 by American travel and navigation information
company, Rand McNally. He was named Black
Enterprise Magazine's Small Business Innovator of
the year and listed in the magazine's Top 40 under 40
and is currently a partner and head of the Principal
Investing group at Constant Capital, a West Africa
based investment bank.
True to form, Echeruo is working on yet another
venture but this time, focused on small businesses in
Africa. Check out a video of Chinedu Echeruo below
at last year's TedxIkoyi where he talks about his latest
project for small businesses in Africa; "crowd
sourced business in a box."
According to him:
"There is no reason why every entrepreneur should
have to reinvent the wheel every single time in all the
countries in Africa. My idea is to essentially to have
one place where a budding entrepreneur can access
a template for starting a business, and then
customize it to suit their own situation. Essentially a
business-in-a-box."
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