Sada Wane moved to Louisville from Senegal in 2013.
Little did he know, his future co-founder moved here on that same day — and was on that same flight.
Wane met Ahmadou "Bamba" Diop at the ESL Newcomer Academy nine years ago, where they were both learning English.
Later graduating from Central High School, the friends-turned-business-partners ended up pursuing different career paths in college. Interested in human-computer interaction, Wane studied neuroscience and informatics at the University of Louisville and Indiana University Southeast, while Diop studied business operations and supply-chain management.
It wasn't until Wane was well on his way to medical school that he became interested in entrepreneurship, thanks to Diop and a startup called e-Teranga, an online marketplace based in Senegal that connected consumers and businesses.
"When I came to the U.S., I didn't even know what entrepreneurship was," Wane said. "The main reason why I wanted to go into medicine was just to be able to help people — throughout your career, you will get to have thousands of patients.
"I saw something similar in the business world, where you are able to impact in other people's lives, but at a crazy scale ... You can reach millions of people."
That first taste of entrepreneurship lit the spark for XpressRun. The Louisville-based logistics startup offers direct-to-consumer brands more affordable access to same-day delivery, while also giving brands end-to-end ownership of the delivery process.
This week, XpressRun was named as one of 12 startups selected for the Google for Startups Accelerator: Black Founders Class of 2022.
Wane said he learned about the opportunity from Laura Russell-Halligan, executive director of Launch Blue, who encouraged the company to apply. He and his co-founders followed her advice, and were picked out of hundreds of applicants this summer.
As a result, XpressRun will get access to the best of Google's programs, products, people and technology.
The 10-week virtual program consisting of mentorship, technical support and curriculum covering product design, machine learning, customer acquisition and leadership development for founders, according to a release from Google (Nasdaq: GOOGL).
"These programs provide access — that's what's most important," Wane said. "We are just trying to take advantage of that."
Founded in 2021, XpressRun started building its minimal viable product (MVP) in December and launched it in January. Before, same-day or next-day delivery wasn't accessible for smaller brands because of the price point.
Wane told me he noticed the problems most direct-to-consumer, e-commerce brands were facing about more than a year ago, and went through UofL's LaunchIt program to do customer discovery.
"We talked for over 100 businesses to try to understand the problem that they were facing with last-mile delivery, and how they were fixing it," he said. "The problem with [last-mile delivery] was that it's just not compatible for smaller- and medium-sized e-commerce businesses. That's why we had the idea of creating this last-mile delivery network to make it accessible for these kinds of businesses."
The company is solving that issue by creating networks of local retailers within the same 20-mile radius and combining their shipping volumes to secure discounts from delivery providers.
Additionally, XpressRun is a white-label solution, meaning that it keeps its clients' brands at the forefront, giving brands the ability to customize what consumers are seeing, in addition to visibility during the shipping and delivery process.
"Just to compete, most smaller and medium-sized businesses were kind of forced integrate their products into third-party sites like Amazon Prime or Doordash," Wane said, explaining that customers are interfacing with those big companies and not the brands themselves. "If you look at our customers, they have these very unique items that you may not be able to find anywhere else. They know the value of their brand."
Today, XpressRun is working with about 50 direct-to-consumer brands, offering a last-mile delivery network with over 3 million drivers across more than 20,000 ZIP codes. Many of those customers came to the company organically, with about 70% joining after it launched its integration with Shopify.
Wane declined to share the company's year-to-date revenue.
In addition to CEO Wane and chief operating officer Diop, XpressRun has a third co-founder, Jordan Mariotti Wood, who leads its sales and strategy. The company has six employees.
XpressRun is in the midst of raising its pre-seed round, which includes an active Wefunder campaign. So far, it's raised more than $78,000 through the crowdfunding effort.
Wane said it was Kelby Price, managing director of Keyhorse Capital, who helped introduce XpressRun's founders to the world of venture capital fundraising, investing $50,000 to get the startup off the ground. It's since received investment from Garrett French, an active Louisville angel investor, and Render Capital kicked in $20,000 to the Wefunder raise.
When talking to investors, Wane said they always start by telling the story of how he and Diop serendipitously ended up on that same fateful flight.
"The universe brought us together."
