Audrey Djiya and Peter Nsaka always aspired to be creators. 

Djiya’s lineage was filled with business owners, spanning back to her forebears, and even after she started a consulting career post-university, she maintained an idea diary, recording the issues she encountered and envisioning how technology could address them. 

“Watching family members engage in cross-border commerce growing up, the hurdles concerning international trade stayed with me,” she shared with TechCrunch. She pursued her studies at Stanford’s Graduate School of Business, where she encountered Nsaka, who shared the same concerns she did. While employed as a software engineer at Shopify, he noticed Shopify’s Black Friday worldwide sales visualization — a live map depicting global transactions — primarily conveyed data from all continents except Africa. 

“This finding remained with me,” Nsaka relayed to TechCrunch. “The straightforward choice would have been to accept the prevailing perceptions, attributing this gap to platform preferences or market constraints. However, my engineering mindset taught me that assumptions hinder creativity.” 

Djiya and Nsaka opted to join forces and establish Zimi, an enterprise that aims to streamline cross-border trade for vendors engaging in international sales. This venture, unveiled earlier this year, declared on Monday the procurement of a $2 million seed round spearheaded by Fearless Fund with involvement from Y Combinator alongside other funds and mentors. The challenge they are aiming to tackle is a significant one: brands transporting goods globally encounter steep shipping expenses, extended delivery periods, and routinely depend on pricey distributors. 

Zimi claims its current concentration is on assisting vendors selling to the U.S., striving to offer localized distribution centers for these global merchants to aid in reducing costs and enhancing development times, all the while aiding them in navigating tax regulations, currency conversions, and compliance issues. 

“Various competitors attempt to resolve different elements of the cross-border dilemma, yet what distinguishes us from them is our comprehensive solution,” Nsaka, Zimi’s CTO, remarked. “All tasks a vendor needs to accomplish to operate internationally can be handled in a single location on our platform.” 

Djiya, serving as the company’s CEO, indicated that the capital raising was relationship-based. Zimi connected with Fearless Fund following a viral post about the company’s inception on Linkedin, which the firm coincidentally noticed. “It was ideal timing as we were beginning to contemplate fund acquisition,” Djiya commented. “Our other backers we found mainly through direct inbound inquiries too.”

Zimi drew initial clientele by compiling leads and contacting brands directly through Instagram and email. “Yet our most significant customer acquisition source emerged unexpectedly,” Djiya explained. “Linkedin.” Djiya and Nsaka began sharing narratives regarding their motivations for establishing Zimi, keeping audiences informed about their development along the journey. 

Soon after, they reported, global vendors commenced reaching out, resonating with the issues Zimi was aiming to address. 

“What truly succeeded was having a hands-on approach with these initial customers,” Djiya elaborated. “We personally aided them in setting up their profiles, resolving issues, and even manually packed some of their initial orders ourselves. This provided us with vital insights into their necessities and assisted us in enhancing our product.” 

Zimi plans to utilize the seed funding to broaden its US delivery networks and develop and implement AI systems to streamline the vendor experience further. Additionally, a payment solution will be introduced next year to assist international vendors in receiving payments in USD. Zimi also seeks to broaden its clientele as well as its team. 

“We’re witnessing significant interest from brands across Europe, Asia, Latin America, and Africa aiming to penetrate the US market, and we need to extend our facilities to support them,” Nsaka expressed. “We’ve barely begun unveiling the full potential of making international trade truly reachable for global brands.” 

This article was revised to clarify Spotify’s data representation and the other participants involved in the funding round.