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.
- +The Kenyan Boeing engineer who chose trucks over prestige
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.
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.
He believes logistics is about fixing the friction that taxes trade across the continent. Years spent working in the American trucking industry exposed him to systems where strangers transact seamlessly because trust is embedded into the infrastructure. Returning to Africa, he encountered endless paperwork, unverifiable operators, delayed payments, and an industry normalised around distrust.
When we spoke, Thuo reflected on leaving Boeing, why Africa’s logistics startups keep failing, the cultural acceptance of inefficiency, and why verification, not payments, is the real bottleneck holding back African trade.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
When people introduce you today, they probably say, “Founder of Apexloads.” What part of your story do they consistently miss?
The part that people miss is that I’m not a tech guy who discovered logistics. It’s actually that I was in logistics—I saw the inefficiencies, the waiting, dealing with brokers—and then I found technology and built a technology solution to solve that problem.
You’ve lived several lives already: student, soldier, engineer, trucker. Which version of Charles Thuo do you trust the most?
It’s not that the military is perfect. I was in some sketchy situations. But the military removes ambiguity. You either show up or you don’t. The mission either succeeds or it doesn’t. And you get to operate in that binary. That’s very important, especially whenever you’re dealing with a market like Africa; you have to have that clarity of mission. You can’t afford distractions or constant pivots. So I trust that version. I don’t trust comfort. The most important thing is having clarity of vision.
How did being an immigrant in the US shape the way you think about building infrastructure back home?
America taught me what infrastructure does, how things are supposed to work. And what you see is that trust is very cheap. In logistics, I worked for over eight years. I have never met a single broker. You work with strangers. You hire someone to deliver something from point A to point B. You get cash based on your invoices. Things just work because the rails are there.
But when you come to Africa, you see the inefficiencies. That’s the real tax on commerce, because whenever trust is expensive, the transaction carries the entire cost of distrust. When you look at Africa, the only thing missing is that infrastructure. Because with infrastructure, everything else falls into place.
The biggest frustration is the acceptance. Whenever I see inefficiency, that’s just a problem that hasn’t been solved. As an engineer, that’s exciting. But whenever you talk to people, and you get that cultural shrug—”Oh, this is Africa” or “This is how things work”—it’s very alarming. Because I see that the people who are supposed to fix things have kind of given up. And that’s what I find a little disturbing, because it’s a problem that can actually be solved.
You earned US citizenship in uniform. Did that experience deepen your connection to Kenya, or complicate it?
I got this strange feeling of what it means to fully belong to something that you’re not born into. And what you learn is that belonging is a choice. It helped deepen my connection to Kenya because these are things we take for granted. It’s one of the reasons I’m finding my way back. Even the problem we’re trying to solve, it wasn’t handed to me. It’s something we chose. And I can appreciate being Kenyan more now.
Your journey reads almost like a controlled experiment in discipline—military, engineering, logistics. What habit from the US Army still shows up in how you run Apexloads?
In the military, we had this thing called an AAR, an After Action Review. Every time you complete a mission, whether it’s good or bad, you do a debrief. Okay, what went wrong? What worked? That’s the most important thing for a startup because there are so many iterations. Sometimes I have to remind myself to celebrate some wins. But I’m more interested in figuring out what worked, because if it worked, you can double down. And what didn’t work, that’s just as important, if not more. That way, you can fix it.
The advantage we have is that our customers’ performance windows are very limited. You’re talking to the same person. So the sooner you solve it, the easier it is to get to the next person. That debrief—after the day, after the week—to analyse it, examine it, that’s super important.
Some of the products we’re releasing, especially around verification and acceptance, I find fascinating. Especially now, in the age of AI, people are very concerned about data, even if they don’t quite understand what that means. So there’s always that initial mistrust: “What do you need my Tax Compliance Certificate (TCC) for? What do you need my CR12 (company search) for? Do you work for the government?” But then, when people start seeing the value, that’s been pretty exciting.
Do you remember the exact moment you decided to walk away from Boeing? What scared you more, the decision or the silence after?
