HOW RIDELINK IS REWIRING EAST AFRICA’S TRADE INFRASTRUCTURE — ONE SHIPMENT AT A TIME
1. You grew up watching your mother’s agricultural store lose significant earnings to transport costs. At what point did that frustration become a business conviction and why did you believe that technology, rather than traditional logistics solutions, was the right lever to pull?
My mother ran a small agricultural business that supported a large part of our household. One season, she hired a transporter to take vegetables to market - the only one available that week, charging nearly double the normal rate. The truck broke down. By the time it arrived, more than half the produce had spoiled. We lost nearly all the capital. After repeated losses, she closed the business and spent five years unemployed. My father carried everything alone. Those were hard years. That experience never left me. Years later, apprenticing with Uber at their Africa launch in Johannesburg, I watched technology coordinate thousands of drivers through a single platform and permanently change how a city moves. It crystallised something: logistics problems are coordination problems - and technology is the fastest, cheapest lever to fix them.
2. Ridelink started as a B2C ride-hailing service before pivoting to a B2B logistics platform for SMEs - a move that reportedly drove 300% revenue growth in a single year. What did you learn from the early model that informed this pivot, and what finally made it feel inevitable?
Early on we noticed businesses were not struggling to move people - they were struggling to move goods. Supply chains were fragmented, pricing was opaque, and businesses had almost no visibility into their shipments. Six months into launching our logistics solution, we had maybe three customers - far fewer than ride-hailing. But they paid repeatedly and at premium margins. Three loyal customers beat hundreds of one-time transactions. Revenue grew over 300% within a year of going all-in on B2B. The signal was clear before the numbers confirmed it.
3. You have described Ridelink as ‘Uber for trucks, but on steroids. Beyond the analogy, what does Ridelink actually do that fleet owners, brokers, or informal WhatsApp groups of drivers cannot replicate and where does the real defensibility of your platform lie?
Ridelink has evolved from a freight marketplace into cross-border trade infrastructure. Through Adrian, our AI logistics agent, fleet owners and freight operators can onboard conversationally, manage fleets digitally, automate customer updates, and access trade financing through Boost - with minimal human involvement. The real defensibility is the data layer. Every shipment generates verified operational intelligence - routes, transit times, payment behaviour — that powers both automation and responsible underwriting. That data only exists because we run the operations ourselves. Better data enables better decisions and better financing, creating a feedback loop that compounds with every shipment. That combination is genuinely difficult to replicate from the outside.
4. Ridelink’s AI-powered platform, Adrian, helps SMEs optimize logistics, but many clients operate on tight margins, basic smartphones, and patchy internet. How do you ensure the technology solves real operational problems, rather than being a compelling story for investors?
We built around our customers' reality, not the best-case version of it. Ridelink behaves like a conversation — similar to WhatsApp — not a complex platform. Customers request quotes by text or voice in their preferred language, track shipments live regardless of carrier, and receive automated updates through WhatsApp, SMS, or email throughout the journey. They can check duties and taxes before importing, and access non-collateral trade financing through Boost when liquidity is tight. The enterprise version integrates directly into existing CRM systems. Our focus has never been technology for its own sake — it is removing the friction and uncertainty that makes cross-border trade so painful for businesses operating on thin margins.
5. Can you share a story of a small business, driver, or SME whose operations were transformed by Ridelink? How did this change look in practice, and what did it teach you about your platform’s true value?
Jofald Rayal exports coffee from Uganda to Dubai. Before Ridelink, a single shipment took nearly three months — up to three weeks stuck at customs — and he once lost an entire container to poor coordination. He was shipping one 20-foot container per year. After working with us, transit time dropped to 21 days, customs clearance to two days, with full cargo visibility throughout. Through Boost's trade financing, he scaled from one container annually to two containers per month. The speed mattered — but what Jofald valued most was control. For the first time, he was running his supply chain rather than being run by it. That shift is what Ridelink actually delivers.
6. Ridelink operates in Uganda, Kenya, and Tanzania, and aims to expand across East and Central Africa. Logistics is deeply local, with different roads, trust dynamics, and regulations in each market. What has surprised you most about entering a new market, and how do you navigate the regulatory and operational hurdles?
The biggest lesson is that the same product has a completely different primary value depending on the market. In some countries, workflow automation is the draw. In others, financing unlocks everything. In others, data visibility is what resonates most. We enter with a hypothesis and adapt quickly based on what we hear. Building with local teams has been essential — not just for navigating regulation, but for credibility. Markets notice the difference between a company that genuinely understands them and one that is simply present.
7. You have raised funding from Ortus Africa Capital, Omidyar Network, Anzisha, and Seedstars; a mix of African and global investors. How do you reconcile the pace and expectations of local versus global investors while scaling rapidly?
African investors tend to move through longer cycles, focusing on unit economics and the real impact on local economies. They want to know the business solves a meaningful problem beyond its financial returns. Global investors, depending on their mandate, move faster and ask a different question — can this reach a massive scale? What does it become at its ceiling? Both perspectives are genuinely valuable. One keeps you operationally honest. The other pushes you to think bigger. The tension between them, managed well, makes you a sharper founder.
8. As Ridelink has grown across countries, how have you built a team and a culture that aligns with your vision? What principles guide you in maintaining cohesion, trust, and execution across diverse markets and remote operations?
I am still figuring this out — and I think any founder who claims otherwise is not being fully honest. What works for us: one-on-ones with every new hire, weekly departmental check-ins, and company-wide training sessions that I participate in as a trainer. Every quarter we do retreats where the team connects outside of work. Internally we organise into tribes — groups of five to eight people who build the kind of trust and accountability that makes distributed teams actually function. The goal is for culture to live in the relationships, not the documents.
9. Looking back, what has been Ridelink’s biggest strategic misstep or operational challenge, and how did it shape the way you approach growth, decision-making, and resilience today?
Assuming that hiring experienced people means they arrive knowing what to do in your specific context. Expertise is context-dependent. Someone exceptional at a large company can struggle in an early-stage environment where the systems they relied on do not yet exist. That assumption cost us time and money. The corrective was our weekly internal training programme — the whole company learns together, across sales, logistics, finance, and leadership. It surfaces leaders we would have never found through external hiring, builds institutional knowledge, and creates organisational density that money can not buy. It requires patience, but it compounds.
10. Logistics is often described as the missing layer that will unlock African trade, especially as AfCFTA evolves. Where do you see Ridelink in five years, and what has to be true about Africa’s infrastructure, policies, and entrepreneurial ecosystem for that vision to become reality?
The source of truth for cross-border trade data in Africa — infrastructure that powers not just logistics, but financing, insurance, and trade compliance across the continent. Think Stripe, but for shipping. For that vision to materialise, three things need to be true: infrastructure keeps improving, AfCFTA moves from aspiration to operational reality, and the ecosystem keeps producing founders willing to build the hard, unsexy infrastructure layers — not just the consumer applications that sit on top. We intend to be one of those builders.
To learn more visit: https://ride-link.com/
