East Africa's logistics sector is undergoing quite the transformation. As cross-border trade expands and e-commerce grows, logistics companies are increasingly relying on technology to optimise deliveries, improve visibility, and reduce costs across complex regional supply chains.
Before the African Continental Free Trade Area came into force, intra-African trade made up just 16% of the continent's total trade, compared to 59% in Asia and 68% in Europe, with average customs dwell times stretching to 126 hours and logistics costs running nearly double the global average. That gap is exactly what a new generation of logistics technology companies is trying to close.
Companies like Leta, Lori Systems, Amitruck, and Sote illustrate what that shift looks like in practice, each tackling a different link in the chain, from last-mile delivery to freight matching to customs clearance. The thesis running through all of them is simple: the biggest logistics innovations aren't happening on the road. They're happening through the software managing what moves on it.
Why Logistics Technology Matters
Several forces are converging to make logistics one of East Africa's most important technology battlegrounds.
Regional trade agreements, including the African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA) and the East African Community's own customs union, are gradually lowering the barriers to moving goods across borders. At the same time, e-commerce is pushing more volume through delivery networks that were never designed for it, and businesses are demanding far greater visibility into where their goods are at any given moment. Fuel costs remain high and volatile, and delivery inefficiencies, from empty return trips to poorly planned routes, continue to eat into already thin margins.
Moving goods efficiently has become just as important as producing them. A manufacturer with excellent products but unreliable logistics still loses to a competitor with an average product and a dependable supply chain.
Leta: Optimising Last-Mile Delivery
Leta was founded in Nairobi in 2021 by Nick Joshi, and it tackles one of the most stubborn cost centres in African commerce: the final stretch between a warehouse and a customer's door. The company's AI-powered platform plugs into the systems businesses already use, such as ERP, point-of-sale, and order management software, to pull in real-time order data. From there, it automatically assigns the best available vehicle for each delivery and plans loading and routing to minimise wasted trips.
Leta says its technology has helped clients save on logistics costs while improving delivery speed and reliability, and it counts major FMCG and retail brands such as KFC, Diageo, and Kingsmill bread among its customers. Backed by investors including Speedinvest and Google's Africa Investment Fund, the company has grown its operations across several African markets since launch, scaling from a few thousand deliveries to several million.
The broader trend: data, not just more vehicles, is what's reducing delivery costs.
Lori Systems: Digitising Freight
If Leta is about the last mile, Lori Systems is about the long haul. Founded in Nairobi in 2016 by Josh Sandler, Lori built a digital freight marketplace that matches cargo owners with vetted transporters, replacing a system historically run on phone calls, brokers, and guesswork. The platform gives shippers real-time tracking, transparent pricing, and digitised documentation, while helping truck owners fill capacity they would otherwise run empty.
From hubs in Kenya, Nigeria, and Uganda, Lori now coordinates freight across roughly a dozen African countries and has connected tens of thousands of trucks to its network. Like several of its peers in the digital freight space, Lori has also had to weather a tougher funding environment: after raising close to $47 million across nine rounds since 2018, the company took on a smaller bridge round in 2025 as it works toward profitability.
The broader trend: freight booking, historically one of the most analogue parts of African trade, is steadily becoming a digital, data-driven process.
As we've explored in why East Africa's enterprise SaaS market is finally taking off, recurring, infrastructure-level software tends to prove more durable than one-off consumer plays, even when individual companies face real financial pressure along the way.
Amitruck: Connecting Transport Businesses
Not every transporter in East Africa owns a fleet of a hundred trucks. Many are small operators with one or two vehicles, and Amitruck was built with exactly that reality in mind. Founded in Kenya in 2019 by Mark Mwangi, Amitruck runs a marketplace where cargo owners post jobs and transporters, ranging from motorbike and pick-up owners to full truck fleets, bid competitively for the work, cutting out layers of middlemen.
Amitruck has also worked to solve one of the biggest constraints facing small transport businesses: access to working capital. Through partnerships such as one with the financing firm IMFact, the company has helped transporters access supply chain financing rather than relying on slow, expensive bank credit. Since launching, Amitruck has raised a seed round backed by Better Tomorrow Ventures and other investors focused on logistics and mobility.
The broader trend: technology is making logistics more accessible for smaller operators who were previously locked out of larger contracts simply because they lacked visibility or credit history.
Sote: Modernising Supply Chains
Customs clearance is one of the least glamorous, most consequential parts of African trade, and it's where Sote has chosen to compete. Founded in Kenya in 2020 by Felix Orwa, Meka Este-McDonald, and Scott Yacko, Sote built what it describes as Africa's first licensed, tech-enabled customs clearing and forwarding service. Its software gives cargo owners a single dashboard to track shipment status, documentation, and payment history, replacing a process that has traditionally run on phone calls, faxes, and paper files.
Sote has raised more than $4 million in seed funding from investors including MaC Venture Capital, and has positioned itself less as a traditional freight forwarder and more as a technology company that happens to offer clearing and forwarding as a service.
The broader trend: paper-based logistics, particularly around customs and documentation, is slowly disappearing across the region's busiest trade corridors.
Four Trends Worth Watching
Visibility is becoming the competitive advantage. Businesses increasingly expect to know exactly where their shipments are at every stage, not just when they've left the warehouse and when they've arrived.
AI is improving logistics planning. Predictive analytics and route optimisation are reducing costs and improving efficiency, turning what used to be guesswork into something closer to a science.
Digital platforms are replacing manual coordination. Phone calls and spreadsheets are giving way to integrated logistics software that connects shippers, transporters, and customers in one system.
Regional trade is driving innovation. As East African and pan-African trade expands under frameworks like AfCFTA, logistics technology becomes increasingly valuable, since moving goods across borders efficiently is now a competitive requirement, not a nice-to-have.
Challenges
The opportunity is real, but so are the obstacles.
Border delays remain common, even as regional trade agreements chip away at them. Physical infrastructure gaps, from patchy roads to congested ports, limit how much software alone can improve delivery times. Regulations are still fragmented across countries, meaning a shipment crossing from Kenya into Uganda or Tanzania can face entirely different documentation requirements at each border. A large share of transport capacity remains informal, run by independent owner-operators who are harder to bring onto digital platforms. And inconsistent internet connectivity, particularly along rural and cross-border routes, can undercut the very visibility these platforms are built to provide.
Technology can improve logistics considerably, but it can't fix a badly maintained road or a slow customs office on its own. Physical infrastructure still matters, and the companies making the most progress are generally the ones building around those constraints rather than assuming them away.
This kind of digitisation also raises the stakes on security, echoing what we've discussed in the cybersecurity companies building East Africa's digital trust infrastructure: as more shipment data, payment details, and customer information move onto shared logistics platforms, protecting that data becomes as important as moving the goods themselves.
Looking Ahead
The future of logistics in East Africa won't be defined by who owns the most trucks. It will be defined by who has the best data.
From Leta's AI-driven last-mile routing and Lori Systems' digital freight marketplace to Amitruck's support for small transporters and Sote's push to modernise customs clearance, these companies are steadily replacing guesswork with visibility across the region's supply chains. As regional trade expands and supply chains become more digital, the companies building logistics technology may become just as important as the transport companies moving the goods themselves.
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