Zacheaus Somorin in Toronto with agency report
Apple has bought
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
report.
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 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.
True to form, Echeruo is working on yet another venture
but this time, focused on small businesses in Africa. 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 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.”
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