Chinedu Echeruo: Contributing to Africa Global Economic Development

Image Credit: Nairaland.com

Born and raise about 45 years ago in Eastern part of Nigeria,  Chinedu Echeruo attended Kings College in Lagos and later further his education at Syracuse University and Harvard Business School in the United State. At completion and ready to start earning with his acquired knowledge and professionalism, his extraordinary quality gave him the opportunity to gain employment at the prestigious Mergers & Acquisitions and Leveraged Finance groups of JPMorgan Chase, and later at the hedge fund AM Investment Partners where he spent several years to gain experience in the corporate world before setting out to follow his passion to contribute to the global economy as techpreneur.

In a space of 5 years he founded two Internet-based companies, HopStop.com a pedestrian navigation service that helps people get door-to-door directions or find nearby subway stations, bus stops, taxi service providers, and car rental places and Tripology.com (a lead-generation and travel referral business for the travel industry).

His desire to fix the dilemma of figuring out how to get from point A to point B using public transit led to the invention of HopStop.com. Launched in 2005, New York-based HopStop is a perennial innovator in the burgeoning location-based service market with not only its popular online and mobile Websites, but also its industry-leading mobile applications for both iOS and Android. The apps cover more than 300 cities throughout the U.S., Canada, Europe, and the United Kingdom. He later sold HopStop to Apple Inc., for an estimated sum of $1 billion while in 2010; Tripology.com was sold to the travel and navigation information company Rand McNally for an undisclosed amount, presently owned by USA Today.

As gathered from Black Enterprise where HopStop was presented with the Small Business Innovator of the Year Award in 2017, HopStop grew 250% in three years, from $574,268 in revenue for 2007 to $2 million in 2010 and an estimated $5 million in 2012. This achievement also gave Chinedu Echeruo the opportunity to receive the Black Enterprise Small Business Awards Hall of Fame Award and was named one of the “10 Most Powerful People in Africa” by Forbes in 2014.

With the sale of HopStop, Echeruo returned to Nigeria where he is a principal at Constant Capital Partners Ltd., a boutique investment bank and personal investment company. He is a board member of Africa.com LLC, a leading Africa related Media Company,  a consultant to Fortune 500 companies and runs three startup companies; MindMeet, BoxCircles and Love and Magic company. His main focus is to contribute to Africa as the next global economic frontier.