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Wednesday 4 March 2015

Apple Inc. Buys Nigerian Born Chinedu Echeruo’s Hopstop.com For $1 Billion





Apple has acquired Chinedu Echeruo’s HopStop.com, 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.”

56 comments:

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  2. Very inspirational and a living witness that if more Africans work harder and remain focused, indeed produce more brilliant and world changing innovators to transform our continent. Keep going Chukwudi and many congra

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  3. I knw him from owerri. Always bn intelligent. Emeka echeruo's brother

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    Replies
    1. Kenny Andam can learn a thing or two from him.

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  4. Good job. This a good one. Thanks you are not a politician looking to steal money from the oil revenue. thief thief .

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  5. Great! it is nice identifying with you

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  6. Well done, ' Edu, nwafor Igbo. Proud of you.

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  7. Hardworking pays. Smart work pays more. Crime doesn't pay

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  8. Remarkable accomplishments sustained by excellence,hardwork and intelligence

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  9. Proudly Nigeria

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  10. You just mentioned Petty criminals,, these are not the ones to mention except you thrive on the system that create them in the 1st place,,, look deeper,, look even deeper there are bigger ones that gave rise to PETTY CRIMINALS!!! if you can call them by their names then the problem is halve solved!!!

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  11. KCOB doing great exploits

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  12. Wow, that's great.

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  13. Ispirational......am challenged

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  14. I am very disappointed with this guy for given his experience he should have known not to give away his talent at such a very cheap offer and would would have gone to the NASDAQ market for over 10 times what he was given

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  15. Nice one post, I really love this

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  16. Quality post; Keep it up, i love the uniqueness

    ReplyDelete