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Nigerian entrepreneur Chinedu Echeruo just became a billionaire, thanks to Apple. Echeruo created an app called HopStop, an international navigation service. Apple has reportedly been acquired the company for a whopping $1 billion as part of the tech giant’s efforts to improve its web and mobile mapping infrastructure, reports PC Tech Magazine.
While the amount is not confirmed, Forbes says the sale was in the “billion dollar range.”
The Wall Street Journal blog “All Things Digital,” was the first to report the HopStop acquisition, which insiders say is Apple’s response to earlier acquisition of a similar service by Google. They paid a little more than $1 billion for Israel-based mapping startup Waze. Many compare HopStop to Waze.
Echeruo launched the site back in 2005 to solves the problems he had navigating through New York City while he was working on Wall Street. The mapping service provides directions and helps people find nearby bus stops and subway stations. HopStop can be used with iOS and Android mobile devices and now covers over 300 cities across the world, including San Francisco, Toronto, London, and Paris. The app adds mass transit directions to Apple’s repertoire, a service that the company had previously relied on Google for.
Echeruo grew up in the eastern part of Nigeria and worked as an analyst at various hedge funds and investment banks before creating HopStop. “The Syracuse University and Harvard Business School graduate worked for a number of years in J.P. Morgan Chase’s Mergers & Acquisitions and Leveraged Finance groups. He also worked with AM Investment Partners, a $500 million bond arbitrage hedge fund,” reports Financial Juneteenth.
Currently, Echeruo is a partner and principal investing group chief at a West Africa-based investment bank called Constant Capital through which he wants to help small businesses in Africa grow.“There is no reason why every entrepreneur should have to reinvent the wheel every single time in all the countries in Africa,” Echeruo said in a 2012 TED Talk. “My idea is to essentially 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.”
