If he hadn’t dropped out, Aubrey Niederhoffer would be nearing the end of his sophomore year at UC Berkeley. Instead, the 19-year-old from the New York area is living in Lagos, where he just launched his food delivery app, Swoop. The 28-person company just booked $7.3 million in seed funding, and the teenager was named to the prestigious Thiel Fellowship.
Swoop, which drew funding from Long Journey, Variant, Version One, Dune Ventures, and Soma Capital, has ambitions far bigger than food delivery. The company’s young founder plans to release a payment app and other services in a bid to create a super app for Africa—a continent that is young, growing, and flooded with mobile phones.
The Thiel Fellowship, founded by billionaire investor Peter Thiel in 2011, offers young people $250,000 to skip or drop out of college and “build new things.” Notable recipients include Figma CEO and cofounder Dylan Field, Ethereum cocreator Vitalik Buterin, and at least one early employee at Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency.
In an interview, Niederhoffer recounted how he grew interested in Africa while playing the online geography game GeoGuessr as a tween. When he was 15, he started a recruiting company focused on the labor pool in Eswatini, and would visit the southern African country during breaks from school.
By the time he reached Berkeley, Niederhoffer had already shut down the company and was preparing to launch Swoop. After debuting the food delivery app in Eswatini in the summer after his first year of college, Niederhoffer decided to drop out of school and pursue his business full-time.
In the fall of 2025, Niederhoffer decided to move his business to Lagos. With the help of AI tools, his team rebuilt its codebase from scratch as it prepared to release an updated version of its app, which went live this month. Food delivery has been on the rise in Africa, but Niederhoffer sees the service as just the first of many that Swoop will eventually offer.
“In Africa, there’s no legacy banking infrastructure. You’re competing with other fintechs. Essentially, you’re not competing with credit cards,” Niederhoffer said. “Those are not popular, and there’s huge opportunity.”
Niederhoffer takes inspiration from Asian markets, where super apps like Kaspi and WeChat have become the “default layer for marketplace services, payments, and everyday life,” he wrote in a blog post.
But in the meantime, the founder is onboarding restaurants and hiring staff to bolster his food delivery startup. There are still problems to triage, Niederhoffer said. Swoop has only operated in fair weather so far, for instance, so he has yet to know how the service would perform in a rainstorm.
