Start with the criticism, because it is deserved and because nobody in this sector makes it seriously.
For ten years, platforms matching shippers and carriers have raised considerable money on the continent. They promised to do for the African truck what ride hailing did for the taxi: transparency, higher utilisation, falling prices. The record is harsh.
What actually happened
Kobo360, in Nigeria, raised around 79 million dollars, including a 30 million round backed by Goldman Sachs. Its model paid carriers upfront while waiting 30 to 90 days to be paid by manufacturers and distributors. When a partner bank pulled its credit line, the cash position collapsed. Layoffs in November 2024, senior departures, and the founder returning in 2025 to run the company with fewer than ten people.
Lori Systems, in Kenya, raised 2 million dollars in a heavily discounted round while pivoting, and now works with a bank to finance transport invoices at rates between 8 and 24 percent a year.
Sendy shut down after moving away from logistics.
In 2024, only three African logistics startups raised venture capital, for 2.1 million dollars in total.
This is not a prosecution. These are public facts, and they say something precise: the problem with African trucking was never the absence of an app.
Why the informal market holds, and has good reasons to
The vast majority of West African transport is arranged directly, in cash, between people who know each other. A platform arrives assuming this is archaic. From the ground, that system solves four problems no application had solved.
It pays fast. The truck owner is paid on delivery, sometimes on departure. A platform paying at thirty days asks him to finance its customer. At 14 to 24 percent a year for credit, that is exactly what he cannot do.
It works without written proof. Trust replaces the contract. It is fragile, but it is immediate, and it costs nothing in paperwork.
It shields from visibility. Being registered means being taxable, inspectable, and sometimes shaken down. Until the payoff for transparency is visible, the calculation favours staying informal.
It absorbs the unexpected. A breakdown, a cancelled load, a three day delay get settled by a phone call between two people who need each other. No system replaces that with a notification.
Add the cost of mobile data, phones that are sometimes shared, and a share of the trade that does not read easily, and you see why adoption is measured in years, not quarters.
What fails every time
Three mistakes keep recurring, and we have watched them closely.
Digitising matching before execution. Putting a shipper in front of a carrier neither party knows, while answering for nothing, simply moves the risk onto the client. He does not come back.
Carrying working capital on both sides. Paying the carrier at seven days and being paid at sixty is buying revenue with equity. It works while the equity keeps coming, and stops the day it stops.
Confusing utilisation with value. Filling a truck on the way back only pays if the job is properly documented, insured and invoiced. Otherwise you have organised cheap freight and taken somebody else's risk.
What works, and why
Now the benefits, because they are real once you take the problem from the execution end.
The file. A shipment whose paperwork is complete stops less at checkpoints. That is time, and time is the first real cost on a corridor. A tool that builds that file with the client, question by question, produces a gain everyone sees on the first trip.
Proof. A timestamped position, a signed and photographed delivery note, a numbered invoice: three disputes out of four disappear. The fourth is settled in an hour instead of three weeks.
Traceable payment. Mobile money, card, bank transfer: every settlement leaves a record, and the record is a credit history. It is that history which, after a year, makes a carrier financeable by a bank or a lessor.
The return leg. Knowing where the trucks are and what they carry is what allows reloading on the way back. It is the only lever that genuinely lowers the price per kilometre, because it raises the number of paid kilometres.
Memory. A file retrieved in ten seconds, a client repeating an identical order, a carrier called back because he did the job properly last time. Informal arrangements forget; a system remembers.
The real pace of adoption
Here is what we observe, without varnish.
A carrier accepts tracking when he understands that it proves his work, not when you explain traceability to him. A shipper moves to online payment after he has been delivered on time once. A driver installs an app when his boss tells him to and it costs him nothing.
In other words, the tool is not adopted because it is modern. It is adopted because it settles a problem the person already had. That is slow, and it is irreversible once it takes.
Where we stand
We are not building a marketplace where two strangers meet at their own risk. We take responsibility for the operation.
The file is built before departure, the carrier is checked document by document, the truck is tracked, the delivery is proven, the payment is traced. Digital is not the product: it is what makes that responsibility sustainable at scale, and what leaves behind every job the evidence that, added up, makes a carrier financeable and a shipper calm.
The informal market will not disappear because someone judged it. It will recede where the alternative pays faster, proves better and costs less time. That is the only line we work on.
Sources: public reporting on Kobo360's funding, difficulties and buyback (amounts raised, 30 to 90 day payment terms, withdrawal of a bank credit line, November 2024 layoffs, founder buyback in 2025); Lori Systems (discounted round, bank partnership for invoice financing, rate range); the closure of Sendy; total African logistics startup funding in 2024; Central Bank of West African States on credit conditions in the monetary union.