Congratulations Felix Orwa and team for raising a $3 million seed round for Sote. We are watching Sote. It elevated the game by actually becoming a licensed tech-enabled customs clearing and forwarding service provider while providing a digital logistics infrastructure in its orchestration model. Of course, that is easy in East Africa.
The company’s software can serve as a workflow tool to manage freight clearing and forwarding as well as a dashboard to track shipment status, payment history and the estimated arrival time for containers.
Sote was founded by the Kenyan native Felix Orwa and co-founders Meka Este-McDonald, a former product manager at Verizon and Gigster, and Scott Yacko a former director of software engineering at Amazon and director of architecture at Walmart.
MaC Venture Capital puts the total addressable market that Sote could tap at roughly $20 billion, given the company’s vertical integration.
In Nigeria, it remains challenging to digitize that process. Zido Logistics is working to make that happen in West Africa by building our “Africa’s DNA of Logistics” system to be “integrated” with customs so that our ecosystem partners can experience a better equilibrium in our platform. Ideally, at optimum equilibrium, ecosystem members should have 360-degree transparency and visibility across the chain, limited by the customs ordinance and technological capability.
This sector is big, and all players can play. To a large extent, the logistics sector remains at infancy. Congrats Sote.
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