If you have ever watched a truck sit idle at Tin Can for days, or heard a manufacturer complain that they paid for cargo they could not move, you already understand the problem Haul247 was built to solve. What you might not know is that solving that problem has made Haul247 one of the fastest-growing companies on the continent.
On 11 May 2026, the Financial Times published its annual ranking of Africa's Fastest-Growing Companies, produced with research firm Statista. Haul247 landed at No.4 overall, in the "Logistics & Transportation" sector, with absolute revenue growth of roughly 1,817% and a compound annual growth rate of about 168% between 2021 and 2024. In plain terms, the company grew revenue from around $0.10 million in 2021 to about $1.93 million in 2024. To qualify at all, a company had to be African-headquartered and clear strict revenue thresholds; to finish in the top handful of 130 firms across the continent is a serious result for a Nigerian logistics startup barely five years old.
What Haul247 actually is
Haul247 is a tech-enabled haulage and warehousing platform. Think of it as an "Uber for trucks" or, as its own founders like to put it, an "Airbnb for trucks and warehouses." It connects businesses that need to move or store goods with the truck owners and warehouse operators who have the capacity to do it. A shipper submits an order, Haul247 attaches a quote, and its software matches that request with the most suitable available truck and warehouse space, then tracks the goods until they arrive.
The distinctive part is that Haul247 does not stop at moving cargo. It bundles warehousing into the same platform, which the founders argue is what separates a durable logistics business from a fragile one. The company has said it has more than 1,000 trucks on its roster and roughly 151,000 square metres of warehouse space across various locations, serving manufacturers, FMCG companies, agricultural aggregators and other large cargo owners.
The founders and the origin story
Haul247 was founded in 2020 by three friends from Obafemi Awolowo University. Sehinde Afolayan (the CEO), Akindele Phillips and Tobi Obasa have known each other for well over a decade. The company is headquartered in Lagos.
The origin story is worth telling because it is so specifically Nigerian. Before Haul247, Afolayan ran an agriculture business. On one deal he paid for several trailer-loads of soya beans, travelled north to collect them, and found he could not get a trailer to move the grain in time. Much of it had spoiled, turning to powder in poor storage. That single painful experience, layered on top of about 15 years in African supply chains, convinced him that technology could fix the twin problems of moving goods and storing them. Haul247 was the answer.
How it works, and why it grew
The Nigerian freight market is enormous, broken, and barely digitised. By Haul247's own account, more than 90% of truck operators in Nigeria are small, informal players with little asset visibility and no easy access to finance. Trucks routinely travel loaded in one direction and return empty. Logistics costs can account for a punishing share of a product's final price. And only about 10% of the sector uses any technology at all. That combination, a huge market with deep inefficiency, is exactly the kind of gap where a well-run platform can grow fast.
Haul247's software matches cargo with available trucks in real time, factoring in load size, destination, truck availability and warehouse proximity. Crucially, it starts matching a truck to its next load before it has even finished the current one, so vehicles spend less time idle. The company says this has cut truck idleness by more than half. It layers on geofencing and real-time tracking so clients can see where their goods are, and it vets trucks and drivers before they join.
The results the company reports are concrete. For an FMCG client, it says it cut the time to secure a truck from 72 hours down to about 18. On one long-haul route from Agbara to Maiduguri, it says regional warehousing and live matching brought transit time down from roughly two weeks to five days. It also runs a 14-day payment cycle for truck owners, which matters enormously in a market where informal operators live and die by cash flow; paying them quickly is how you convince sceptical drivers to trust a platform at all.
