For eight years, Lara.ng, the WhatsApp-style chatbot that informed you which ones bus to take, what the fare must be, and which backroad to keep away from, was Lagos’s unofficial transit oracle.
Samuel Odeloye, the founder behind that chatbot, now lives in america. However the knowledge Lara.ng has collected by no means left Lagos. From an workplace 1000’s of kilometres away, he’s engaged on one thing tougher than giving bus instructions: constructing the invisible pipes to make last-mile supply in Nigeria dependable and efficient.
That rigidity, constructing deeply native infrastructure from overseas with native knowledge, is what defines this chapter of his life as a digital nomad.
Act I: Leaving residence to construct for residence
Odeloye left Nigeria in 2011 for what he describes as ‘a greater life’: entry to an surroundings that impressed his entrepreneurial drive. There was higher entry to United States banking, company buildings, and a greenback‑denominated fundraising surroundings that was virtually not possible to copy from Lagos.
It was on a flight from the US that he conceived the thought for Lara.ng.
“I prefer to introduce myself as an engineer, generally an entrepreneur, however normally, an issue solver,” Odeloye stated. “I’ve refused to attend for another person to construct infrastructures in cities the place I see issues being wanted.”
Recent out of the College of Lagos with a mechanical engineering diploma, he was extra obsessive about design pondering than oil‑and‑gasoline paychecks. A flight in 2012 made the issue he needed to resolve really feel painfully apparent.
On a New York–London leg en path to Lagos, he discovered himself seated subsequent to an American who had by no means left the US and was panicking about getting round London. Odeloye talked him via Transport for London’s (TfL) system, which his cousin had proven him as soon as.
With TfL, you typed in a postcode and bought step‑by‑step instructions. On that flight, they laughed about how “Nigeria can by no means have one thing like that.” However the joke landed with a sting.
“I had this robust name in my coronary heart that that is one thing I might do,” he recalled.
The query that refused to go away him was: What occurs when it’s the American flying into Lagos with no cousin and no TfL?
The obsession adopted him into enterprise faculty. In 2014, he joined Stanford Graduate Faculty of Enterprise for an govt grasp of enterprise administration (EMBA) in innovation and entrepreneurship, hoping so as to add construction to his instincts.
That very same 12 months, with companions Opeoluwa Bada and Nnamdi Nwanze, he began RoadPreppers (RP), a localised public transit intelligence system for Nigeria that labored like Google Maps however tried to maintain up with Lagos’s ever‑shifting bus routes and fares.
RoadPreppers attracted about 10,000 registered customers after which grew. It was a tradition misalignment, stated Odeloye, as he observed that Nigerians discovered it tough to dispose of inborn navigation instincts.
“I used to be constructing for the Nigerian person with a Western understanding,” he stated. Nigerians would possibly recognize a map, however they grew up asking conductors, shopkeepers, and strangers for instructions. “[Nigerians] attain out to have conversations. And if [they] don’t know tips on how to get someplace, [they] will ask on the street.”
He stopped combating the tradition and leaned into it.
Act II: The chatbot that thought like Lagos
In 2017, Odeloye launched Lara.ng after sunsetting his earlier metropolis navigation-based try, RoadPreppers. This time, he wasn’t making an attempt to show Nigerians tips on how to use or love maps, he stated.
He taught a chatbot to speak like a Lagosian: a easy digital buddy that answered navigation questions, for the shy customers who weren’t daring sufficient to stroll as much as strangers on the road.
He and his co‑founders took the routing intelligence they’d constructed and wrapped it in a WhatsApp‑model interface. Customers might sort “from Oshodi to Ikeja” the way in which they’d textual content a buddy. Lara.ng would reply with the precise danfo to take, the place to drop off, and the way a lot to pay.
In response to Odeloye, the rising person site visitors informed them they had been onto one thing: the app pulled in 10,000 customers inside days of going dwell. Simply earlier than the COVID‑19 pandemic, Lara.ng had greater than 250,000 customers navigating Lagos and Abuja’s transport networks.
Earlier than ChatGPT and the present wave of AI hype, a bot constructed by a Nigerian founder within the diaspora had change into a each day companion for individuals making an attempt to not get misplaced—or extorted—on their commute
But, recognition didn’t translate into revenue. Protecting Lara up to date meant fixed fieldwork, hitting the streets to map new routes, monitor fare hikes, and maintain tempo with transport unions. The enterprise mannequin by no means totally clicked, regardless that the necessity was clear.
COVID‑19 uncovered that fragility. As lockdowns and distant work shrank mobility, Lara’s utilization dipped, and the economics stopped making sense.
“For many of 2020, it was onerous,” he admitted. Teammates left, and all that was left was a messy roadmap and a mountain of onerous‑gained knowledge.
Eight years into the experiment, Lara.ng was taking a break. However the info it had collected—on how individuals transfer, the place they get caught, and the way a lot they pay—was too useful to desert.
Act III: Pivoting the info to last-mile logistics
If Lara.ng was about getting individuals from level A to B, Motions House applied sciences, Odeloye’s new last-mile supply startup, is about getting packages there, on time, with out drama.
He spent the primary eight months of 2022 in deep analysis and improvement on logistics. After speaking to enterprise homeowners, he discovered a sample: order quantity spikes at all times left an extended path of lengthy, generally aggressive WhatsApp chats between companies and supply riders, and sometimes, frantic calls.
Odeloye stated he noticed many infrastructure gaps within the last-mile supply house, the place belief is the core foreign money and virtually every part nonetheless runs by hand. He needed to vary that.
He constructed a system that automates belief so utterly that it turns into a non-risk and easily fades into the background. The purpose was to not make belief pointless, however to make the service so dependable that it simply works.
“Generally you don’t have to innovate outdoors of the place issues are already occurring,” stated Odeloye. “You need to keep within the realm of the place issues already occur.”
In Nigeria, what “already occurs” is small companies sharing the variety of their dispatch man and juggling orders over the telephone.
Motions inserts a software program layer between that chaos and the client. The platform permits companies that at present depend on WhatsApp and calls handy off order acceptance, buyer communication, and rider coordination to an agent‑like system that automates the boring stuff.
It manages order prioritisation, assigns jobs to the precise rider, and reveals precisely the place every bundle is. Underneath the hood, it leans on the routing intelligence initially constructed for Lara.ng to parse addresses and assign deliveries extra intelligently.
However software program alone can’t repair the final mile in a metropolis the place addresses are fluid, and riders get blamed for every part from site visitors to theft. So Odeloye determined to construct {hardware} too.
The Motions lockers—known as Nest Pods—are bodily kiosks the place dispatch riders can drop off packages, and prospects can choose them up at their comfort. They’re constructed regionally, not imported, to maintain prices in examine and make scaling throughout Nigerian cities extra sensible.
A typical supply would possibly appear like this: a buyer locations an order; the service provider dispatches by way of Motions; a rider is assigned; as an alternative of combating to find a selected compound, the rider drops the bundle within the nearest Nest Pod. The shopper receives a code, walks as much as the locker, and opens it utilizing a PIN, QR code, wristband, or Bluetooth from the app. Inside, their merchandise is ready.
Each interplay is recorded. Cameras seize arrivals and drop‑offs; app logs present who opened which locker when. If a rider opens a compartment and tries to shut it with out leaving a bundle, inner sensors flag it. The system merely refuses to shut the transaction till an merchandise is detected inside, baking accountability into the metallic.
“Belief is the actual product,” Odeloye stated.
In a market the place “he stated, she stated” is the default when deliveries go fallacious, having video, sensor knowledge, and an indeniable audit path adjustments the dialog.
Early exams of Motions’ software program and locker combo have reportedly minimize supply instances by about half and lowered prices by a few third for some companions, because of extra environment friendly routing and clustered drop-offs, Odeloye stated.
The startup remains to be bootstrapped, with help from family-and-friends traders, together with his spouse, preferring to show the mannequin earlier than taking institutional capital.
Odeloye stated a rollout of pods is deliberate for Lagos, to show these lockers into mounted supply nodes throughout dense neighbourhoods.
Twin context as a superpower
From the surface, it might look contradictory: a founder who lives within the US however is constructing logistics infrastructure for Nigeria.
“It’s actually onerous constructing two very deep essential infrastructures, particularly if you’re bootstrapped,” Odeloye stated. “It’s onerous to handle each concurrently.”
Whereas the US provides him much-needed entry to entrepreneurial and social capital, he says the product and the goal market are squarely Nigerian. The belongings for Motions, together with the lockers, electronics, and a lot of the production-grade tinkering, are constructed regionally.
Jesimiel Williams, who joined Lara.ng in 2019 and later labored with Motions because the product designer, remembers strolling into Odeloye’s residence in 2024 and seeing “metallic panes, wired panels and all of that on the home.”
The operating joke between Williams and his brother was that it felt like being in Tony Stark’s residence: the massive machines had been elsewhere, however the first-principle experiments had been occurring proper there.
From the US, Odeloye spends his days and nights straddling time zones: speaking to Nigerian retailers and logistics companions, debugging {hardware} designs with groups on the bottom, and pitching international companions who perceive the infrastructure thesis however would by no means construct it themselves.
“What Nigeria wants is not only extra apps,” he informed me. “We’d like infrastructures—bodily and software program infrastructures—issues that international corporations is not going to construct as a result of the unit economics don’t justify it but. That’s the hole we’re making an attempt to occupy at this second.”
Distance hasn’t made him much less Nigerian; it has made his convictions extra exact. Residing within the US lets him benchmark in opposition to international logistics and locker techniques, examine how cloud-like “locker as a node” fashions scale, after which come again to Nigeria’s realities with higher questions. The problem is to not let that vantage level dilute his sensitivity to how individuals transfer, pay, and complain in Lagos.
Constructing with knowledge is the one thread Odeloye sees operating from the earliest RoadPreppers days to no matter Motions turns into subsequent. The third model of Lara.ng, rebuilt in December 2025 with what he calls “higher routing intelligence,” remains to be being upgraded.
The transit bot could also be a shell now, however its ghosts dwell in Motions’ tackle parser and routing engine.
But, the check for Odeloye and his Motions thought is whether or not prospects will desire to stroll to a pod or demand door supply throughout the wet season.
Odeloye lives within the US, however his work is firmly anchored in Nigerian streets and the realities on the bottom; its junctions and tensions of operating a enterprise in a spot the place infrastructure gaps are the rule, not the exception.
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