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 publication.
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 oft 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. He was named Black Enterprise
Magazine’s Small Business Innovator of the year and listed in the
magazine’s Top 40 under 40 and is currently a partner and head of the
Principal Investing group at Constant Capital, a West Africa based
investment bank.
True to form, Echeruo is working on yet another venture but this
time, focused on small businesses in Africa. Check out a video of
Chinedu Echeruo below at last year’s TedxIkoyi where he talks about his
latest project for small businesses in Africa; “crowd sourced business
in a box.”
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.”
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