Context
I founded eAdrasha as a locally developed location-intelligence platform for navigation, place discovery, addressing, routing, geocoding, and location-data services.
Entrepreneurship / Location Intelligence
Built the First Ethiopian Digital Web Map — eAdrasha
Creating a local technology venture around a practical urban problem: making addresses, places, businesses, and services easier to discover and navigate.
- Role
- Founder & Chief Executive Officer
- Company
- eAdrasha
- Period
- 2017-2020
- Location
- Addis Ababa, Ethiopia
- Team
- 40+ people
- Users
- 25,000+ within six months
The Problem
Reliable digital addressing and location discovery were significant challenges in Addis Ababa. Businesses, residents, logistics operators, and service providers needed better ways to find places, search for destinations, navigate the city, and use structured location information.
What I Built
I founded eAdrasha as a locally developed location-intelligence platform and built the organization around it, combining product development, software, geospatial data, field operations, quality assurance, partnerships, customer engagement, and business development.
What I Did
- company strategy
- product direction
- team building
- software and data operations
- field data collection
- quality assurance
- partnerships
- customer engagement
- business discovery
- routing
- geocoding
- APIs
- location-data services
- speeding up cloud and platform performance
How I Approached It
As Founder and Chief Executive Officer, I moved between product strategy, software, geospatial data, field collection, quality assurance, partnerships, customer engagement, infrastructure performance, and organizational leadership.
Key Business & Technical Impact
- Product & Team Leadership: Built and managed a 40+ person multidisciplinary team across software engineering, GIS mapping, and field operations.
- Scale & Market Adoption: Scaled the platform to 25,000+ active users within six months of launch.
- Ground-Truth Data Collection: Created an authoritative baseline urban dataset by hand-tagging 50,000+ micro-locations and 800+ landmark structures using open-source geospatial tools (Leaflet, OpenStreetMap).
What This Enabled
A locally developed platform and multidisciplinary operating company that reached more than 25,000 users within six months and grew to more than 40 team members.
Key Lesson
Building useful technology requires more than software. It requires data operations, product judgment, customer understanding, partnerships, quality systems, and execution.
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Working on a Difficult Systems Problem?
I am interested in leadership, advisory, and partnership opportunities involving public-sector transformation, digital systems, data, infrastructure, and technology across Africa and internationally.
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