Our Story

One rider, forty parcels, and a seller who couldn’t get paid.

TimeSwift started in 2014 because an overseas vendor had Kenyan customers she could neither reach nor collect from. Twelve years on that is still the entire job — just with five warehouses, 62 agents and 1,200 riders doing it.

Founded 2014 1,200+ riders 6 markets by 2028

The TimeSwift operations and call centre team in Nairobi

A TimeSwift rider setting off through Nairobi traffic

How It Began

An overseas seller couldn’t get paid, and we had a motorbike.

In 2014 our founder was running errands on a borrowed bike when an overseas cosmetics seller asked him a strange question: could he deliver forty parcels around Nairobi and bring back the cash? She had customers ordering, no way to reach them, and no way to collect money from a country she had never visited.

He delivered thirty-six of the forty. The four that failed had bad phone numbers — and that failure is what built the rest of this company. Call the customer first, and almost everything else works.

Twelve years later the model is unchanged, just larger: overseas vendors ship us stock, we call every buyer, our riders deliver and collect the money, and the vendor gets paid every week.

Milestones

Twelve years, one region at a time

We only opened a regional warehouse once rider demand in that city already justified it.

2014

One rider, forty parcels

A single overseas seller, forty Nairobi deliveries, and cash carried back in a satchel.

2016

The first phone bank

Four people calling customers before dispatch. Failed deliveries halved within a month.

2018

Industrial Area warehouse

Vendors stopped posting parcels one by one and started shipping us bulk stock to hold.

2020

Weekly remittance

We standardised paying vendors every seven days with a reconciled statement — still our most-praised feature.

2022

We built our own platform

Call outcomes, rider positions and COD balances in one system, because nothing off the shelf understood cash on delivery.

2024

Regional warehouses

Mombasa, Nakuru, Kisumu and Eldoret opened with their own managers and riders. Upcountry delivery went from three days to one.

2026

Where we are today

300+ vendors, 1,200+ riders, 62 call centre agents, 1.4 million orders a year and a 90%+ same-day success rate in Nairobi.

2027–28

Across the border

Kampala first, then Dar es Salaam, Addis Ababa, Lusaka and Harare — the same warehouse-and-riders model.

How We Work

Six things we refuse to compromise on

Call before you ride

No parcel leaves a warehouse for an unconfirmed order. It is the single rule the whole company is built on.

Named people, not queues

Every region has a manager, and every order has a rider whose name the customer is told in advance.

The vendor’s money is the vendor’s money

COD is reconciled daily and remitted weekly. We never trade on float collected on someone else’s behalf.

We publish our failures

A 90%+ same-day rate means we miss some. Those appear in your dashboard with a reason, not quietly re-queued.

Discreet by default

Unmarked packaging on every order, whether it is a phone case or a course of medication. What someone buys is their business, not the neighbourhood’s.

Customer data stays sealed

Agents dial through the system and never see a phone number. Nothing about a customer can be copied, exported or sold.

Our Team

The people between your product and your buyer

Regional managers, call centre leads and rider operations — most of them promoted from inside the business.

Samuel Otieno

Founder & Managing Director

Delivered the first forty parcels himself in 2014. Still reads the failed-delivery report before anything else.

Mercy Wanjiru

Head of Call Centre

Runs 62 agents across eight languages, and wrote the confirmation structure the whole floor works from.

Moses Ochieng

Head of Rider Operations

Recruited our first 40 riders in 2021. Now oversees more than 1,200 across five regions.

Brian Kamau

Regional Manager · Nairobi

Owns the country’s busiest warehouse and the same-day promise that goes with it.

Amina Hassan

Regional Manager · Coast

Took Mombasa from a store room to a full regional operation in under two years.

David Mutiso

Head of Engineering

Built the COD reconciliation and vendor dashboard in-house after no off-the-shelf tool could handle cash.

Grace Wanjiru

Head of Vendor Success

The person most overseas vendors actually talk to. Handles onboarding and weekly remittance queries.

Faith Nyambura

Expansion Lead

Running the Kampala and Dar es Salaam launches. Spends more time scouting warehouses than in the office.

Every order, every shilling

Kenya today. East Africa next.

A Kenyan company, scaling out