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"Ship, Store, Fulfill, and Grow Internationally"
🛎TLDR: They’re bringing Amazon-prime-like fulfillment to exporters in emerging markets - making it easy, fast, and cheap for these businesses to sell internationally.
For example: Businesses selling with Zimi can deliver parcels to their international buyers for as little as ~$10 (instead of $80) and in just 2 days time.
Founded by Audrey Djiya & Peter Nsaka
They met while completing their respective graduate school programs in CS and an MBA at Stanford.
- Peter is a second-time founder with experience in cross-border freight, SMB payments, and building commerce products as a project tech lead at Shopify
- Audrey is a product leader, having scaled e-comm businesses like Peloton internationally and developed fintech solutions to enable commerce in emerging markets.
Zimi is named after Audrey’s great-grandmother, a quick-witted entrepreneur who successfully kept food on the table as a single mom through her export business. With Zimi, They’re creating opportunities for hustlers like Audrey’s great-grandmother by making global commerce more accessible to everyone.
❌ Problem
Cross-border e-commerce is projected to reach $2 trillion in merchandise value by 2030, with 64% of this opportunity coming from emerging markets. However, merchants in these regions face significant obstacles:
- High shopping costs often exceed 100% of order value
- Lengthy delivery times of 2 weeks or longer
- Costly cross-border return processes are a major financial drain
- Complex and time-consuming logistics management (customs/duties, paperwork, tracking)
These challenges result in an estimated $50 billion annual loss for African businesses alone, with similar figures in Latin America and South Asia.
📦 Solution
Zimi makes selling globally as easy, affordable, and simple as selling locally by optimizing cross-border logistics:
- Cheap and Faster Shipping: They enable 2-day delivery at up to 80% less than current shipping costs by localizing inventory
- Simplified Returns: They take the headache out of international returns, managing the entire process to reduce costs and improve customer satisfaction, saving businesses thousands of dollars.
- Streamlined Cross-Border Operations: Zimi handles the complexities of international shipping, customs clearance, warehousing, and last-mile delivery, freeing merchants to focus on growing their business instead of logistics
Zimi’s first customer sold $25K in merchandise within 48 hours of announcing 65% cheaper shipping costs and fast delivery timelines with Zimi. They’re on track to unlock millions in revenue for businesses across India and Nigeria - their first two key export markets.
