AUBREY NIEDERHOFFER has kicked off his start!

 Aubrey Niederhoffer, Thiel Fellow

If he hadn’t dropped out, Aubrey Niederhoffer would be nearing the end of his sophomore year at UC Berkeley. Instead, the 19-year-old from the New York area is living in Lagos, where he just launched his food delivery app, Swoop. The 28-person company just booked $7.3 million in seed funding, and the teenager was named to the prestigious Thiel Fellowship.

The Thiel Fellowship, founded by billionaire investor Peter Thiel in 2011, offers young people $250,000 to skip or drop out of college and “build new things.” Notable recipients include Figma CEO and cofounder Dylan Field, Ethereum cocreator Vitalik Buterin, and at least one early employee at Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency.

In an interview, Niederhoffer recounted how he grew interested in Africa while playing the online geography game GeoGuessr as a tween. When he was 15, he started a recruiting company focused on the labor pool in Eswatini, and would visit the southern African country during breaks from school.