Sometimes you meet a founder and instantly know you need to bet on them. Aubrey is such a founder. We could not be more excited to back Aubrey and co-lead this investment in Swoop, an African super app.
Aubrey grew up obsessed with geography, and by 12 was a competitive GeoGuessr player running a Discord community with 150+ countries represented. At 15, he started a company sourcing remote workers in Africa. But he didn’t want to build from the US — he wanted to be on the ground building something generational. So he moved to Eswatini, launched a food delivery app as a proof of concept for Swoop, and within months had the largest ecommerce platform in the country. Then he dropped out of college, moved to Lagos, and began expanding Swoop’s services across the continent. He’s 19. His ambition is off the charts, and the execution matches it.
Swoop is building Africa’s super app — food delivery today, and expanding into payments, lending, and commerce across a continent of 1.6 billion people where digital payments are growing over 10% year-over-year but remain radically fragmented across 1,000+ providers. The playbook mirrors what Grab and Gojek did in Southeast Asia: start with a high-frequency vertical, build an agent network, then layer on financial services. Africa’s infrastructure gap — the thing that killed earlier attempts at ecommerce on the continent — has closed, and Swoop is positioned to capture the inflection.
We believe Swoop represents crypto’s increasingly important role: as the infrastructure that every application touching money will eventually use. Blockchain rails are the superior rails for moving money and accessing financial services — particularly in a market like Africa, where payments are fragmented, cross-border flows are expensive, and hundreds of millions of people remain underserved by traditional banking. As Swoop scales into payments, lending, and commerce, critical activity will run onchain. This is what crypto adoption actually looks like — not as the product people see, but as the infrastructure underneath the products they use every day.
Aubrey, who was just named a 2026 Thiel Fellow, is going after the biggest opportunity on the continent, and we’re proud to be along for the ride.