Nigerian Founder Builds Lagos Transit Solutions from US

A flight conversation about getting lost in London led to a navigation tool that would help a quarter million Nigerians find their way home.

Samuel Odeloye left Lagos for the US in 2011, chasing better access to funding and infrastructure for his ideas. But on a 2012 flight, sitting next to an anxious American worried about navigating London, he realized his home city needed the same solution.

The difference was Lagos doesn't move like London. Roads shift, bus routes change daily, and fares fluctuate with the mood of transport unions.

His first attempt, RoadPreppers, launched in 2014 with maps and routing intelligence. It attracted 10,000 users but never quite clicked with how Nigerians actually navigate: by asking people.

"I was building for the Nigerian user with a Western understanding," Odeloye admitted. Lagosians don't naturally turn to maps when they can ask a conductor or shopkeeper for directions.

So in 2017, he stopped fighting the culture and built Lara.ng instead. This time, no maps, just a WhatsApp-style chatbot that answered questions the way a friendly Lagosian would.

Type "from Oshodi to Ikeja" and Lara would tell you which danfo to take, where to drop, and exactly how much to pay. It felt like texting a knowledgeable friend, not consulting a foreign app.

The response was instant. Within days, 10,000 people were using Lara.ng. By early 2020, that number hit 250,000 across Lagos and Abuja.

Then COVID lockdowns froze the city. Usage dropped, team members left, and the business model that never quite worked collapsed completely.

After eight years, Odeloye paused Lara.ng in 2022. But he kept something more valuable than the app: millions of data points about how people actually move through Nigerian cities.

The Ripple Effect

Now Odeloye is building something harder than bus directions. He's using Lara's data to create infrastructure for reliable last-mile delivery in Nigeria, tackling the logistics problems that make getting packages to doorsteps so unpredictable.

The same cultural insight that made Lara work, understanding how Nigerians actually behave rather than how Silicon Valley thinks they should, is guiding this new chapter. He's building local solutions with local data, just from a different zip code.

Thousands of miles from Lagos, Odeloye is still solving Lagos problems. The location changed but the mission never did.

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