Charles Thuo’s career journey makes very little sense, at least until you sit down with him. By his own admission, it did not make much sense to his parents either when he walked away from a stable career path in America to chase logistics and trucking. “They’ve since come around,” he said, bursting into laughter.
He studied engineering, served in the United States military, worked at aerospace giant Boeing, then walked away to drive trucks and build a logistics startup. But spend an hour with the founder of Apexloads—a logistics startup that connects cargo owners with transporters— his obsession with systems, and his frustration with broken ones, becomes clear.
“I come from a very humble background, and that works in my favour,” Thuo says early into our conversation. “At Apexloads, we’re very scrappy. When we tell people we haven’t raised any money, they’re surprised. I learned resourcefulness growing up.”
That resourcefulness now sits at the heart of a company trying to solve trust in logistics, one of Africa’s least glamorous but most consequential commerce problems. Apexloads is building digital infrastructure for transporters, brokers, and shippers, verification rails that Thuo believes could unlock financing, reduce payment delays, and remove inefficiency from East Africa’s freight economy.
