Lori expands pan-African footprint with new Nigerian operations

Oct 3, 2019: Pan-African e-logistics company, Lori, has announced its expansion to Nigeria in a bid to extend its footprint across Africa.

This comes 10 months after the company completed a successful pilot in Nigeria with some top cargo companies including Olam, Honeywell Flour Mills and Flour Mills Nigeria, the company said in a statement.

Founded in 2016, Lori Systems is solving inefficiencies in Africa's cargo transportation industry. It was established by Josh Sandler and Ernest Gichini Ngaruiya to reduce the cost of moving goods across the continent. Individuals and businesses operating in Africa spend $180 billion on goods transport annually. But according to Lori, this high cost inflates the cost of products with as much as 75% of the price of a product being attributed to logistics, compared to 6 percent in the US.

Lori wants to fix this and has developed an online platform for truck drivers, allowing transporters to find available drivers to move their cargo.

Lori already has some competition in Nigeria. Kobo360, a Nigerian digital logistics platform backed by the International Finance Corporation, recently secured a $30 million Series A funding from US investment bank, Goldman Sachs, TLCom Capital, YCombinator and some Nigerian banks.

Another competitor is TradeDeport, a startup backed by the Partech Africa Fund. TradeDeport is focused on the FMCG sector and helps to connect distributors to retailers in the informal sector. When it secured $3 million in April 2018, the startup had the biggest financing among logistics startups in Nigeria and already claims some of the biggest FMCG companies as clients including Unilever, Kellogs, and PZ Cussons.