A Houston-based participant in Amazon's new accelerator aims to simplify doing business between the U.S. and growing markets in Africa.
Heroshe is an e-commerce and enablement startup serving buyers and sellers in the U.S. and Nigeria. Small-business customers using Heroshe are able to track shipments from the U.S. to arrival in Lagos, Nigeria, or can pay to have shipments delivered across the country.
Osinachi Ukomadu, co-founder and CEO of Heroshe, said the concept for the business started out by helping friends and family in Nigeria purchase items in the U.S. Instead of traveling to the U.S., filling suitcases with purchased items, going through customs and traveling back to Lagos, shipping items to Nigeria was a faster and less expensive option.
As more and more people started businesses and required items sourced from overseas, Ukomadu saw an opening for his own business.
"[It was] a viable opportunity to help more people essentially get their businesses started, source for products in the U.S. and access U.S. markets — without the expensive costs or the overly complicated way that it was being done before," Ukomadu said.
Since formally launching in 2019, Heroshe has grown its headcount to about 25 employees in the U.S., Nigeria and other locations with remote workers. The company has an office in Lagos and warehouse space in Houston for shipment fulfillment.
After recently being selected for Amazon.com Inc.'s (Nasdaq: AMZN) inaugural AWS Impact Accelerator for Black Founders, Heroshe sees even more opportunities to scale. Ukomadu said Heroshe aims to leverage different AWS tools and technologies during the company's time in the eight-week program.
"We're given a technical mentor and a business mentor, and we're given platform access to be able to build and scale our operations," Ukomadu said. "What we're building is not just operationally complex, it's also technologically complex."
While Heroshe is currently focused on business between the U.S. and Nigerian markets, Ukomadu sees a lot of opportunity to expand the company's capabilities in other areas in Africa. Heroshe plans to expand with other markets in western Africa before looking at the east, south and north African regions.
Following Heroshe's participation in the AWS Impact Accelerator, the company plans to begin fundraising for a seed financing round, Ukomadu said.
