From Boeing cockpit to truck seat: Building Africa's logistics backbone
Enterprise
By
Brian Ngugi
| May 20, 2026
Charles Thuo used to design aircraft for Boeing. Then he got behind the wheel of a truck and discovered a $50 billion (Sh6.4 trillion) hole in Africa’s economy.
The 38-year-old Kenyan founder of logistics technology startup Apexloads sits at an unusual crossroads: aerospace engineer, US Army veteran, former owner-operator truck driver, and now tech entrepreneur trying to digitise one of Africa’s most fragmented industries.
“My family thought I had lost my mind going from Boeing to truck driving. But that shift gave me a vantage point I could not have gotten any other way,” Thuo told Enterprise via email in an exclusive interview. “
That vantage point revealed what Thuo calls a “staggering gap” in African logistics. According to the UN Trade and Development (UNCTAD), road transport costs account for roughly 29 per cent of the price of goods traded within Africa – compared with just seven per cent for goods traded outside the continent.
In the United States, logistics costs run at about eight per cent of the gross domestic product. In African low-income economies, that figure climbs to between 25 and 30 per cent.
“The inefficiency is not primarily a roads problem or a fuel problem,” Thuo said. “It is an information and trust problem. Freight does not flow efficiently when counterparties cannot verify each other, transactions happen on handshakes, and there is no working capital infrastructure for the transporters doing the actual work.”
Thuo’s journey to logistics began more than 15,000 kilometres away from East Africa’s trucking corridors. He arrived in the US in 2010 as an international student from Kenya, working nights at a Coca-Cola warehouse while taking a full course load at Oklahoma State University.
He later enlisted in the US Army as a quartermaster, served two overseas deployments under Operation Freedom Sentinel, and earned his US citizenship in uniform.
He went on to earn a degree in aerospace engineering from the University of Oklahoma. He was commissioned as an engineer officer in the Oklahoma National Guard and built a career at Cessna and Boeing.
Then he walked away. Trucking started as a side hustle, he said. But the economics were impossible to ignore: “I could earn my entire two-week Boeing paycheck in three days driving a truck.”
Freight financing
As an owner-operator in the US, Thuo gained ground-level fluency in how freight actually moves – the load boards, verified carrier networks and instant freight financing. He began asking himself how the same work got done back home.
What he found was a sector held back by missing carrier identity systems, cash flow cycles that trap small transporters, and trust gaps that inflate costs for everyone.
Unlike digital freight brokerages such as Kobo360 or Lori Systems, Apexloads does not move cargo. Thuo is careful to draw the distinction. “Apexloads is to African logistics what a stock exchange is to capital markets,” he said. “We do not own the assets; we create the conditions for credible transactions to happen.”
The startup, which operates across Kenya, Uganda and Tanzania, is building three interconnected digital rails: carrier verification, freight transaction matching, and invoice factoring. The goal is to create a verified identity system for transporters – called EAC Profile – that can become a continental standard.
“If you cannot verify who you are dealing with, you cannot build a reliable supply chain,” Thuo said. “That insight became EAC Profile.”
The hardest piece to implement, he said, has been carrier verification. “Compliance is not a natural instinct in this market. When margins are thin and working capital is tight, survival instincts kick in. Operators run on worn tyres and deferred maintenance, not because they do not care about safety, but because the economics leave them no room.”
Apexloads remains largely bootstrapped. Thuo has put roughly $6,000 to $S30,000 (Sh780,000 to Sh3.9 million) about three years ago. Today, the company has five full-time and two part-time employees.
“Infrastructure companies require patient capital, and most investors are not patient,” Thuo said. “They want proof of scale before they commit, but scale requires the infrastructure to exist first. That circular problem means you have to be willing to outlast the timeline most people expect. My trucking income bought us that time.”
Operational barriers
The company is now scaling across all eight East African Community member States and into Zambia, moving by trade corridor rather than country borders. Thuo said the African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA) creates a regulatory tailwind, but operational barriers remain.
“Trade does not happen without trust and enforceable contracts,” he said.
“That is the foundation, and most of Africa’s cross-border trade still lacks both. The conversations around trade facilitation are improving, but they remain more aspirational than operational.”
Recent disruptions in the Red Sea have driven up diesel prices across East Africa, squeezing transporters already running on razor-thin margins. “The operators I am most concerned about are those still servicing truck financing: their fixed obligations do not move when fuel prices do,” Thuo said.
“Some of them will not survive a prolonged squeeze. That consolidation will hurt small independent operators most, which is exactly the segment Apexloads was built to serve and protect.”
For young Africans wanting to build tech companies that fix broken infrastructure sectors, Thuo offers a sober assessment. “The underestimated hard part: you are not solving a technology problem. You are solving a behaviour change problem,” he said.
“Infrastructure companies do not succeed because the product is clever. They succeed when enough stakeholders change how they operate. That requires patience, relationships, and a tolerance for slow that most founders underestimate badly.”
“The underestimated opportunity: whoever builds the infrastructure owns the market. Not the operators who use it, not the investors who fund it, but the builder. In sectors where foundational infrastructure does not yet exist, the company that lays the rails sets the rules.” Thuo said Apexloads aims to make EAC Profile the continental standard for logistics operator identity within the next three to five years.
“We go where the cargo goes,” he said. “AfCFTA creates the regulatory tailwind; we build the digital rails that make it operational.”