The Kenyan Boeing engineer who chose trucks over prestige

Charles Thuo’s career journey makes very little sense, at least until you sit down with him. By his own admission, it did not make much sense to his parents either when he walked away from a stable career path in America to chase logistics and trucking. “They’ve since come around,” he said, bursting into laughter.

He studied engineering, served in the United States military, worked at aerospace giant Boeing, then walked away to drive trucks and build a logistics startup. But spend an hour with the founder of Apexloads—a logistics startup that connects cargo owners with transporters— his obsession with systems, and his frustration with broken ones, becomes clear.

“I come from a very humble background, and that works in my favour,” Thuo says early into our conversation. “At Apexloads, we’re very scrappy. When we tell people we haven’t raised any money, they’re surprised. I learned resourcefulness growing up.”

That resourcefulness now sits at the heart of a company trying to solve trust in logistics, one of Africa’s least glamorous but most consequential commerce problems. Apexloads is building digital infrastructure for transporters, brokers, and shippers, verification rails that Thuo believes could unlock financing, reduce payment delays, and remove inefficiency from East Africa’s freight economy.

He believes logistics is about fixing the friction that taxes trade across the continent. Years spent working in the American trucking industry exposed him to systems where strangers transact seamlessly because trust is embedded into the infrastructure. Returning to Africa, he encountered endless paperwork, unverifiable operators, delayed payments, and an industry normalised around distrust.

When we spoke, Thuo reflected on leaving Boeing, why Africa’s logistics startups keep failing, the cultural acceptance of inefficiency, and why verification, not payments, is the real bottleneck holding back African trade.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity. 

When people introduce you today, they probably say,  “Founder of Apexloads.” What part of your story do they consistently miss?

The part that people miss is that I’m not a tech guy who discovered logistics. It’s actually that I was in logistics—I saw the inefficiencies, the waiting, dealing with brokers—and then I found technology and built a technology solution to solve that problem.

You’ve lived several lives already: student, soldier, engineer, trucker. Which version of Charles Thuo do you trust the most?

It’s not that the military is perfect. I was in some sketchy situations. But the military removes ambiguity. You either show up or you don’t. The mission either succeeds or it doesn’t. And you get to operate in that binary. That’s very important, especially whenever you’re dealing with a market like Africa; you have to have that clarity of mission. You can’t afford distractions or constant pivots. So I trust that version. I don’t trust comfort. The most important thing is having clarity of vision.

How did being an immigrant in the US shape the way you think about building infrastructure back home?

America taught me what infrastructure does, how things are supposed to work. And what you see is that trust is very cheap. In logistics, I worked for over eight years. I have never met a single broker. You work with strangers. You hire someone to deliver something from point A to point B. You get cash based on your invoices. Things just work because the rails are there.

But when you come to Africa, you see the inefficiencies. That’s the real tax on commerce, because whenever trust is expensive, the transaction carries the entire cost of distrust. When you look at Africa, the only thing missing is that infrastructure. Because with infrastructure, everything else falls into place.

The biggest frustration is the acceptance. Whenever I see inefficiency, that’s just a problem that hasn’t been solved. As an engineer, that’s exciting. But whenever you talk to people, and you get that cultural shrug—”Oh, this is Africa” or “This is how things work”—it’s very alarming. Because I see that the people who are supposed to fix things have kind of given up. And that’s what I find a little disturbing, because it’s a problem that can actually be solved.

You earned US citizenship in uniform. Did that experience deepen your connection to Kenya, or complicate it?

I got this strange feeling of what it means to fully belong to something that you’re not born into. And what you learn is that belonging is a choice. It helped deepen my connection to Kenya because these are things we take for granted. It’s one of the reasons I’m finding my way back. Even the problem we’re trying to solve, it wasn’t handed to me. It’s something we chose. And I can appreciate being Kenyan more now.

Your journey reads almost like a controlled experiment in discipline—military, engineering, logistics. What habit from the US Army still shows up in how you run Apexloads?

In the military, we had this thing called an AAR, an After Action Review. Every time you complete a mission, whether it’s good or bad, you do a debrief. Okay, what went wrong? What worked? That’s the most important thing for a startup because there are so many iterations. Sometimes I have to remind myself to celebrate some wins. But I’m more interested in figuring out what worked, because if it worked, you can double down. And what didn’t work, that’s just as important, if not more. That way, you can fix it.

The advantage we have is that our customers’ performance windows are very limited. You’re talking to the same person. So the sooner you solve it, the easier it is to get to the next person. That debrief—after the day, after the week—to analyse it, examine it, that’s super important.

Some of the products we’re releasing, especially around verification and acceptance, I find fascinating. Especially now, in the age of AI, people are very concerned about data, even if they don’t quite understand what that means. So there’s always that initial mistrust: “What do you need my Tax Compliance Certificate (TCC) for? What do you need my CR12 (company search) for? Do you work for the government?” But then, when people start seeing the value, that’s been pretty exciting.

Do you remember the exact moment you decided to walk away from Boeing? What scared you more, the decision or the silence after?

It’s the silence after. When you have a job, everything is structured. It’s a big company, so you know what your job is. People train you. But once you leave, it’s like you get here, now what? Sometimes that can be distressing because you might try to find distractions to close that gap. But I’m very pragmatic. Even the decision to leave was easier. It wasn’t because of Apexloads; Apexloads actually came after. I’m a systems guy, and I fell in love with logistics. Even the silence wasn’t as bad. It was quiet. It wasn’t dramatic. And I never looked back.

Do I have any regrets? Not at all. Not at all. Right now, it’s weird for a CEO to say, “I don’t like offices.” That’s the most frustrating part, because when you start a company, you never see this part; you don’t get to have all the fun. But I love systems, and logistics is the ultimate system. Every day is a different day. You learn something new. I don’t think I’ll ever go back. I don’t regret it because even if I had stayed, there’s not that much I would have missed. It would have just been another day.

There’s a certain audacity in leaving aerospace engineering to drive trucks. Were you chasing something, or running away from something?

It’s more of chasing. I started in logistics as a side hustle while still working at Boeing. So by the time I left, I had already done about six months, we had a truck, and I was hiring drivers. I already had an idea. But logistics is not something you do part-time. That’s where a lot of people go wrong; it’s not a passive thing. You have to be very actively involved. And I thought I had a better future in logistics than at Boeing, so I wanted to do more of that.

And it’s the acceptance piece. You see inefficiency, and you say it’s a problem that needs to be solved. But when you find people who have kind of given up—”Oh, this is Africa, this is Kenya, this is how people do it”—I’m like, what do you mean? Because I know brilliant people. This is not complicated. And I’ve talked to a lot of people who say, “Oh, it’s not that simple.” I think that’s the biggest lie. It’s actually very simple. That’s what makes it more frustrating.

Apexloads is solving verification, payments, and financing at once. Which of these is the real bottleneck, and which just looks like one?

Verification is the real bottleneck. Finance is where the pain shows, the delayed payments, the cargo held hostage because the broker didn’t pay the transporter. But everything starts with verification. Cash flow is a major problem, but then you hear a press conference where Equity says it has a lot of money. And I’m like, why are they not giving it to transporters? The reason is they don’t know who you are. They cannot verify your operations. But if you have verification, trust is there, and everything unlocks.

So verification is the most important thing. It’s just that if there’s no verification, you don’t get the money. People see the pain of delayed payments and think that’s the problem, but it’s actually a symptom.

Logistics in Africa is often a graveyard of well-funded startups. What are they consistently getting wrong?

The biggest thing is that they try to control too much of the stack. That’s one of the problems we ran into in the beginning. Whenever someone hears Apexloads, they try to put you in the same bucket as those startups, trying to be the operator, the technology provider, the financier, all at once. You just try to do too much. And if you do that, you’re competing with your customers. Because if your customer is also a broker and you want to be one too, that’s not trust.

That’s why Apexloads is pure technology. We do not participate in the transaction. Because if you’re building a platform, it needs to be neutral; that’s where trust comes into play. If a broker is trying to use Apexloads, I cannot have them worrying that Apexloads will take their client. That’s where most of them go wrong. But it requires patience. And it goes back to, when you’re a participant, it’s very easy to raise money, so that’s why most of them make that mistake. But if you participate too much—liability, distrust—I think that’s one of the reasons most of them fail.

If you had the ear of East African transport regulators for an hour, what’s the one policy change that would unlock the most value overnight?

Right now, the biggest thing would be to mandate verification. Every operator needs a digital ID that is verifiable, portable, and verifiable by anyone. Because that is the biggest friction. It’s the biggest trade tax. You have all these regulators trying to govern people they can’t even see. Who is a broker? Who is a transporter? You can’t even see these people. But if you have verification—if you can identify the person you’re working with—then governance becomes actually very easy. So the one policy: you cannot be on the road unless you have a verifiable identity.

What part of your life did you have to quietly let go of to become this version of yourself?

Giving up what people think success is. Like being a Boeing engineer, working for the greatest aerospace company in the world. That’s success. If you’re in America, that’s what they say: that’s the American dream. People have these definitions of success: the title, the salary, all that stuff. I had to let that go. And then you start telling your story in a different way. But you have to be okay with being misunderstood. Because those were difficult conversations, especially with my family. “How do you go from Boeing to driving a truck?” It comes from how much we put on prestige.

What do your parents think of what you’re doing now?

They’re coming around. When you’re building infrastructure, much of it isn’t visible. It sounds intuitive, good infrastructure, you want it to be invisible. These things that we just do, you don’t even think about them. Which makes it even more invisible. Because if people are noticing, that means something is not working as it should. I usually look at it like building a sidewalk. You don’t think about it. But if it wasn’t there, you’d say, “Hey, why is that not a sidewalk?” At the end of the day, if bills are paid, people ask fewer questions. When everything looks like it’s working, that’s when it’s hardest. Because in a crisis, people come together. When things are smooth, that’s when you feel alone.

Was there ever a moment you felt completely alone in your journey, even when everything looked like it was working?

Yes. When things are working, people just assume you’re fine. And when you’re building something foundational—like what we’re doing—you’re operating at a level that most people around you are not going to share. So a lot of the time, you stop waiting for someone to validate the mission. You just have to carry it.

What doubt still visits you, even now?

It’s whether we’re moving fast enough. I don’t have doubts about the problem we’re solving; I’ve been in it. I know it’s real. But infrastructure requires patience, and the window for who gets to build it doesn’t stay open forever. The sequencing. I think about that a lot. Whether the timing of what Africa’s logistics needs and what we’re building, whether it closes in our favour. That’s the biggest thing.

Ten years from now, if Apexloads works exactly as you envision, what disappears from the system, and who loses?

What disappears is the friction tax. There’s a lot of margin that goes to bad actors extracting from transactions. The cash-flow crisis keeps many transporters out of business because trust doesn’t exist; it disappears.

Who loses? Two types of people. Brokers who have built their entire business model on information asymmetry. Middlemen who add no value are translating between two people who don’t trust each other. When trust becomes cheap, extraction becomes more expensive. That’s not a symptom of what we’re building; that’s actually the point. All of that needs to go away.

I learned this from my dad. He would always say: If you can solve something, you don’t need to worry about solving it. If you can’t, then you also don’t need to worry about it. The biggest thing I always try to understand is what is actually going wrong. Whenever a transporter or a broker has a reservation or a conflict, you don’t want to focus on the surface. That’s just where the issue shows up. That’s the symptom. You want to understand where this is coming from. You want to get to the bottom of it.

A classic example: Every time you talk to a transporter, they’ll tell you they don’t want to work with a broker, they want to work directly with a shipper. But if you understand logistics, that’s not possible. If you’re a shipper, your core business isn’t logistics. And let’s say you ship 10 trucks a day; most transporters only have one or two. So you’ll be dealing with 10 different companies. A shipper doesn’t want to do that. That’s why they use a broker to aggregate capacity.