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Audrey Djia and Peter Nsaka always wanted to be founders.
Djia’s parents, grandparents, and great-grandparents were entrepreneurs, and even when she took a consulting job after college, she kept an ideas journal, documenting problems she saw and potential ways technology could help solve them.
“I grew up watching family members move goods across borders, and the challenges of international trade really stuck with me,” she told TechCrunch. She went to graduate school for business at Stanford University, where she met Nsaka, who was thinking all the time about the same challenges she faced. He was working as a software engineer at Shopify when he saw Shopify’s Black Friday global sales visualization — a real-time map showing transactions around the world — that could relay data about every continent in the world except Africa.
“That remark stuck with me,” Nsaka told TechCrunch. “The easy way out was to accept conventional wisdom, and attribute this variation to platform preferences or market constraints. But engineering taught me that assumptions are the enemy of innovation.
Djia and Nsaka decided to team up Zemi launcha company that seeks to simplify cross-border trade for merchants who sell across borders. The company, which launched earlier this year, on Monday announced it had raised a $2 million seed funding round led by Fearless Fund with participation from Y Combinator. The problem they’re trying to solve is a big one: brands that ship internationally face high shipping costs, long delivery times, and often rely on expensive distributors.
Zimi says his focus now is merchants selling in the U.S., and is trying to provide local fulfillment centers for those international merchants that can help cut costs and developer times, all while helping them manage tax regulations, currency exchange, and compliance.
“There are competitors out there to solve different pieces of the cross-border puzzle, but what sets us apart from them is the comprehensive solution we offer,” said Nsaka, CTO at Zimi. “Everything a merchant needs to do to sell internationally can be done in one place on our platform.”
Djia, the company’s CEO, said the fundraising was about relationships. Zimi met Fearless Fund after a post about the company’s launch went viral on Linkedin and the company happened to see it. “The timing was perfect as we were just starting to think about fundraising,” Djia said. “We met our other investors primarily through direct access as well.
Zimi attracted its first customers by generating lead lists and reaching out to brands directly on Instagram and via email. “But our biggest customer acquisition channel came from an unexpected place,” Djia said. “LinkedIn.” The Djia and Nsaka began sharing stories about what led them to build Zimi, keeping people updated on their road trip.
International traders soon began communicating regarding the problems Zimi was trying to solve, they said.
“What really worked was the hands-on training with those early customers,” Djia continued. “We personally helped them set up their accounts, solved problems, and even agreed to some of their first orders myself. This gave us invaluable insights into their needs and helped us improve our product.”
Zimi will use the seed round to scale its fulfillment networks in the US and build and apply AI models to make the merchant experience more seamless. It will also launch a payment solution next year to help international merchants receive payments in US dollars. Zimi is also looking to expand its client base and team.
“We are seeing strong interest from brands across Europe, Asia, Latin America and Africa who want to reach American customers, and we need to expand our infrastructure to support them,” Nsaka said. “We’ve only scratched the surface to make global commerce truly accessible to global brands.”
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