APPLE ACQUIRES NIGERIAN CHINEDU ECHERUO'S HOPSTOP.COM FOR $1 BILLION

In its continuous attempts to match up to Google’s mapping abilities, Apple has bought Chinedu Echeruo’s HopStop.com for $1 billion. This development is seen as Apple’s move to bolster its mapping services offering especially given Google’s recent acquisition of Waze for $1 billion.

Chinedu Echeruo is a highly successful, serial entrepreneur grew up in Eastern Nigeria and attended Kings College, Lagos before proceeding to Syracuse University and the Harvard Business School in the United States. He worked 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.
In 2005, he raised nearly $8 million to start HopStop.com and Tripology.com. HopStop.com is a mobile applications company that boasts of an online city transit guide that offers direction and maps and is available on both iOS and the Android platform. They cover over 300 cities and help people find local directions, subways stations, trains and bus stops. In 2010, Tripology.com was purchased by American Travel and navigation company, Rand McNally.

He is already working on another business and project. This time he is focusing his talents on the Motherland, Africa. He says it is for small businesses on the continent. 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.”

With his track record, access and smarts, it is sure to be another hit in a long line of successes for the entrepreneur.