Audrey Djiya and Peter Nsaka always wanted to be founders.
Djiya’s parents, grandparents, and great-grandparents were all entrepreneurs, and even as she took a consulting job after college, she kept an idea journal, documenting the problems she saw and the potential ways technology could help solve them.
“Growing up watching family members move goods cross-border, the challenges around international commerce really stuck with me,” she told TechCrunch. She went to Stanford Graduate School of Business, where she met Nsaka, who, the whole time, pondered the same challenges she had. 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 worldwide — could relay data about every continent in the world but Africa.
“This observation stuck with me,” Nsaka told TechCrunch. “The easy path would have been to accept the conventional wisdom, to attribute this disparity to platform preference or market limitations. But engineering has taught me that assumptions are the enemy of innovation.”
Djiya and Nsaka decided to team up and launch Zimi, a company that seeks to simplify cross-border commerce for merchants selling cross-border. Launched earlier this year, the company announced on Monday the raise of a $2 million seed round led by Fearless Fund with participation from Y Combinator. The problem they are trying to solve is a big one: brands shipping internationally face high shipping costs, long delivery times, and often rely on expensive distributors.
Zimi says its focus right now is merchants selling into the U.S., trying to provide localized fulfillment centers for these international merchants that can help cut costs and developer times, all while helping them manage tax regulations, currency exchange, and compliance.
“There are competitors that exist to solve different pieces of the cross-border puzzle but what sets us apart from them is our holistic solution,” Nsaka, Zimi’s CTO, said. “Everything a merchant needs to do to sell internationally can be done in one place on our platform.”
Djiya, the company’s CEO, said the fundraising was relational. Zimi met Fearless Fund after a post about the company’s launch went viral on Linkedin and the firm happened to see it. “Which was perfect timing as we were just starting to think about fundraising,” Djiya said. “Our other investors we met primarily through direct inbound as well.”
Zimi attracted early customers by generating lead lists and reaching out to brands directly on Instagram and by email. “But our biggest customer acquisition channel came from somewhere unexpected,” Djiya said. “Linkedin.” The Djiya and Nsaka started sharing stories about what motivated them to build Zimi, keeping people updated on their journey on the way.
Soon, they said, international merchants started reaching out relating to the problems Zimi was trying to solve.
“What really worked was being hands-on with these early customers,” Djiya continued. “We personally helped them set up their accounts, troubleshoot issues, and even packed some of their first orders myself. This gave us invaluable insights into their needs and helped us refine our product.”
Zimi will use the seed round to scale its US fulfillment networks and build and apply AI models to make the merchant experience more seamless. It’s also launching a payment solution next year to help international merchants receive payment in the US dollar. Zimi is also looking to expand its customer base and team.
“We’re seeing strong interest from brands across Europe, Asia, Latin America, and Africa who want to reach US customers, and we need to expand our infrastructure to support them,” Nsaka said. “We’ve only scratched the surface of making global commerce truly accessible for international brands.”