Though Ridelink began in Kampala, its headquarters now sits in San Francisco. The team spans roughly 14 people, a lean crew operating across key trade corridors globally.Though Ridelink began in Kampala, its headquarters now sits in San Francisco. The team spans roughly 14 people, a lean crew operating across key trade corridors globally.

Ridelink targets SME trade with AI logistics and embedded finance

Ridelink wants to turn fragmented supply-chain and trade-finance pain into a single, data-driven platform. This idea combines logistics, credit, and predictive AI in one system, which is vital because companies trading across Africa and Asia often juggle multiple intermediaries, struggle with cash-flow gaps and face price opacity.

Ridelink, founded in 2017, says it removes that friction by offering a unified workflow. That level of integration could shift the dynamics for importers and exporters operating across frontier trade corridors.

A shipper posts a request on Ridelink’s web platform. That triggers the firm’s AI engine, Adrian AI, to generate quotes by tapping a network of vetted carriers. Adrian handles documentation, customs clearance, and coordinates transport, providing live tracking until delivery.

Because Ridelink captures operational data like what is shipped, by whom, from where, and whether it arrives on time, it builds an operational profile for businesses. That profile doubles as a credit file. For companies overlooked by traditional banks, this becomes a tool to assess credit.

That’s where Boo$T comes in. Instead of requiring upfront working capital, Ridelink offers embedded financing for stock purchases, freight, customs costs and even taxes. The same data that drives logistics powers credit decisions. The result is a streamlined flow from purchase order  to payment and delivery, all under Ridelink’s umbrella.

A three-pronged solution

Ridelink targets three persistent issues in cross-border trade. The first one is fragmentation. In this case, a single container or consignment often spans freight forwarders, customs brokers, warehouses, and local transporters. Importers end up coordinating every leg, often manually, sometimes at odd hours, chasing updates on messaging apps. This fragmentation slows trade and creates chaos for small businesses without big supply-chain teams.

Secondly, there is a cash-flow mismatch in which suppliers want payment upfront, but buyers may pay only 60 to 90 days after delivery. For many African SMEs that cash-flow gap can kill a trade deal. Traditional banks rarely help because they lack visibility into the actual transaction.

Lastly, there is opacity that results in varying prices depending on who you know, what volume you ship, and which corridor you use. Smaller businesses often end up paying much more.

Ridelink claims to address all three by coordinating end-to-end logistics. It offers embedded credit and provides transparent, data-based pricing.

Still, some problems have not been fully addressed. Once goods move into overland transport inside Africa, end-to-end visibility becomes patchy. And trade finance on the scale African SMEs need remains under-supplied. Ridelink is starting to chip away at both, but Daniel Mukisa, the startup’s founder, admits the gap is enormous.

“End-to-end visibility across borders remains patchy—especially once goods hit land transport in Africa. And trade finance at the scale African SMEs need is still massively undersupplied. We’re chipping away at both, but the gap is enormous,” Mukisa said. 

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Company, team, and structure

Though Ridelink began in Kampala, its headquarters now sits in San Francisco. The team spans roughly 14 people, a lean crew operating across key trade corridors globally.

Operations are split across regions. The East African shop (Kampala and Nairobi) handles operations, carrier coordination, and customer success. Teams in India and China manage supplier relationships and carrier sourcing at origin. Dubai manages shipments through the UAE and the routes connecting Asia and Africa. San Francisco focuses on strategy, fundraising and major customer deals.

The company is structured around three core verticals, including product and engineering (building Adrian and the platform), operations and customer success (keeping shipments moving), and commercial and partnerships (corridor expansion and financing partnerships).

Carrier network, vetting, and reliability

Ridelink built a network of more than 25,000 transporters. But onboarding doesn’t rely on volume alone. It’s a two-stage vetting process: documentation checks (vehicle registration, insurance, operating licenses, identity verification) followed by performance monitoring.

Every shipment feeds into a carrier’s reliability score like on-time delivery, damage rate, documentation accuracy, and responsiveness. Carriers who underperform see fewer assignments. Top carriers get priority access to high-volume or premium shipments.

That performance-driven matching gives Ridelink a dependable core fleet. The top 200 carriers handle most volume while the rest provide geographic reach and surge capacity.

Ridelink often holds funds in escrow until delivery confirmation to align incentives. That ensures carriers deliver before funds are released.

What Adrian AI brings

Adrian AI performs key tasks, including real-time quoting, smart matching and predictive pricing. When a shipper submits a request, Adrian runs historical pricing data, cargo type, route, weight, urgency and current carrier availability to generate a quote. 

The system picks based on prior performance on similar routes, specialization (cold-chain, hazmat, oversized cargo) and current capacity. That reduces delay risks and mismatches.

On established corridors, especially air freight from India to East Africa and road transport within East Africa, Adrian’s quoted cost falls within 5% of the final invoiced cost in over 85% of cases. On newer corridors, accuracy is lower, and Ridelink surfaces that transparency to its clients.

Adrian also forecasts rate trends for repeat corridors and incorporates seasonal demand, fuel cost fluctuations and capacity supply to help shippers decide when to move cargo.

The embedded financing product, Boo$T, takes a different path from traditional credit. Instead of collateral or bank statements, Ridelink uses operational data as the credit file. Shipment history, payment behaviour, supplier relationships and delivery performance paint a reliable credit picture.

Financing is tied to specific transactions, and repayment is linked to customer receivables. If a shipment fails, Ridelink knows immediately and can act to manage risk. The firm works with lending partners, lending firms supply the capital, Ridelink provides underwriting and performance visibility.

So far, that means short-term loans of 30–90 days, full shipment-level financing, and goods-in-transit insurance. Ridelink claims there are no defaults to date.

That matters for SMEs who lack bank credentials but regularly trade across borders. The option to get credit in hours rather than weeks, with no collateral, could unlock many trade deals that would otherwise stall.

Recommended Reading: In what future can Africans transact without borders? The one Oreoluwa Adeyemo is building

Business model, margins and growth levers

Ridelink generates revenue primarily through transaction fees on freight; it takes a cut on every booking. For freight-only customers, margins remain thin because logistics is inherently volume-driven.

But when finance gets layered in through Boo$T, revenue per customer jumps by two to three times. Combined with financing fees, the blended margin improves significantly.

Embedding finance also boosts customer stickiness. When shippers rely on Ridelink not just for transport, but for working capital, they are more likely to stay. Cash flow cycles, shipment scheduling and financing are all integrated into a single system.

Finally, the more Ridelink handles — logistics, data, capital — the deeper its visibility into risk and demand. That feedback loop improves underwriting, matching, pricing and reliability. The combination of freight and finance gives Ridelink a business structure resembling a physical-goods version of a payments rails company.

Ridelink recently closed a $1.1 million pre-seed round. The money will drive key priorities, including wider adoption of its embedded finance product and deepening automation.

Between now and the next funding round, expect announcements of strategic corridor partnerships, expanded financing capacity, new enterprise customers, possibly in pharma, automotive or industrial goods, and public metrics on AI-driven efficiency gains.

To speed up its marketplace engine, Ridelink has identified three levers. First, carrier density on key routes implies that there are more vetted carriers with proven track records, especially on newer corridors. More carriers equals better coverage, competitive pricing and faster matches.

Second is demand aggregation. Concentrating volume on a few key corridors allows Ridelink to negotiate better rates, attract carriers and build a self-reinforcing network effect. The firm says it will resist the temptation to spread across too many corridors too soon.

Third, the startup is looking into deeper automation. The less manual work needed, the fewer friction points. Adrian must handle documentation, customs pre-clearance and exception routing automatically. That frees the team to focus on relationships, complex flows and expansion.

“Liquidity in a marketplace means a shipper posts a request and gets multiple competitive options instantly. In India to East Africa, we’re there. On newer corridors, we need more carrier partners with proven performance,” Mukisa said. 

Read Also: How this Ilorin-based fintech is scaling credit access with proprietary lock tech

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Turn lengthy earnings call transcripts into one-page insights using the Financial Modeling Prep APIPhoto by Bich Tran Earnings calls are packed with insights. They tell you how a company performed, what management expects in the future, and what analysts are worried about. The challenge is that these transcripts often stretch across dozens of pages, making it tough to separate the key takeaways from the noise. With the right tools, you don’t need to spend hours reading every line. By combining the Financial Modeling Prep (FMP) API with Groq’s lightning-fast LLMs, you can transform any earnings call into a concise summary in seconds. The FMP API provides reliable access to complete transcripts, while Groq handles the heavy lifting of distilling them into clear, actionable highlights. In this article, we’ll build a Python workflow that brings these two together. You’ll see how to fetch transcripts for any stock, prepare the text, and instantly generate a one-page summary. Whether you’re tracking Apple, NVIDIA, or your favorite growth stock, the process works the same — fast, accurate, and ready whenever you are. Fetching Earnings Transcripts with FMP API The first step is to pull the raw transcript data. FMP makes this simple with dedicated endpoints for earnings calls. If you want the latest transcripts across the market, you can use the stable endpoint /stable/earning-call-transcript-latest. For a specific stock, the v3 endpoint lets you request transcripts by symbol, quarter, and year using the pattern: https://financialmodelingprep.com/api/v3/earning_call_transcript/{symbol}?quarter={q}&year={y}&apikey=YOUR_API_KEY here’s how you can fetch NVIDIA’s transcript for a given quarter: import requestsAPI_KEY = "your_api_key"symbol = "NVDA"quarter = 2year = 2024url = f"https://financialmodelingprep.com/api/v3/earning_call_transcript/{symbol}?quarter={quarter}&year={year}&apikey={API_KEY}"response = requests.get(url)data = response.json()# Inspect the keysprint(data.keys())# Access transcript contentif "content" in data[0]: transcript_text = data[0]["content"] print(transcript_text[:500]) # preview first 500 characters The response typically includes details like the company symbol, quarter, year, and the full transcript text. If you aren’t sure which quarter to query, the “latest transcripts” endpoint is the quickest way to always stay up to date. Cleaning and Preparing Transcript Data Raw transcripts from the API often include long paragraphs, speaker tags, and formatting artifacts. Before sending them to an LLM, it helps to organize the text into a cleaner structure. Most transcripts follow a pattern: prepared remarks from executives first, followed by a Q&A session with analysts. Separating these sections gives better control when prompting the model. In Python, you can parse the transcript and strip out unnecessary characters. A simple way is to split by markers such as “Operator” or “Question-and-Answer.” Once separated, you can create two blocks — Prepared Remarks and Q&A — that will later be summarized independently. This ensures the model handles each section within context and avoids missing important details. Here’s a small example of how you might start preparing the data: import re# Example: using the transcript_text we fetched earliertext = transcript_text# Remove extra spaces and line breaksclean_text = re.sub(r'\s+', ' ', text).strip()# Split sections (this is a heuristic; real-world transcripts vary slightly)if "Question-and-Answer" in clean_text: prepared, qna = clean_text.split("Question-and-Answer", 1)else: prepared, qna = clean_text, ""print("Prepared Remarks Preview:\n", prepared[:500])print("\nQ&A Preview:\n", qna[:500]) With the transcript cleaned and divided, you’re ready to feed it into Groq’s LLM. Chunking may be necessary if the text is very long. A good approach is to break it into segments of a few thousand tokens, summarize each part, and then merge the summaries in a final pass. Summarizing with Groq LLM Now that the transcript is clean and split into Prepared Remarks and Q&A, we’ll use Groq to generate a crisp one-pager. 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We’ll write a helper to summarize any text block, then run it for both sections and merge. import osimport textwrapimport requestsGROQ_API_KEY = os.environ.get("GROQ_API_KEY") or "your_groq_api_key"GROQ_BASE_URL = "https://api.groq.com/openai/v1" # OpenAI-compatibleMODEL = "llama-3.1-70b" # choose your preferred Groq modeldef call_groq(prompt, temperature=0.2, max_tokens=1200): url = f"{GROQ_BASE_URL}/chat/completions" headers = { "Authorization": f"Bearer {GROQ_API_KEY}", "Content-Type": "application/json", } payload = { "model": MODEL, "messages": [ {"role": "system", "content": "You are a precise, neutral equity research analyst."}, {"role": "user", "content": prompt}, ], "temperature": temperature, "max_tokens": max_tokens, } r = requests.post(url, headers=headers, json=payload, timeout=60) r.raise_for_status() return r.json()["choices"][0]["message"]["content"].strip()def build_prompt(section_text, symbol, quarter, year): template = """ You are an equity research analyst. Summarize the following earnings call section for {symbol} ({quarter} {year}). Be factual and concise. Return: 1) TL;DR (3–5 bullets) 2) Results vs. guidance (what improved/worsened) 3) Forward outlook (specific statements) 4) Risks / watch-outs 5) Q&A takeaways (if present) Text: <<< {section_text} >>> """ return textwrap.dedent(template).format( symbol=symbol, quarter=quarter, year=year, section_text=section_text )def summarize_section(section_text, symbol="NVDA", quarter="Q2", year="2024"): if not section_text or section_text.strip() == "": return "(No content found for this section.)" prompt = build_prompt(section_text, symbol, quarter, year) return call_groq(prompt)# Example usage with the cleaned splits from Section 3prepared_summary = summarize_section(prepared, symbol="NVDA", quarter="Q2", year="2024")qna_summary = summarize_section(qna, symbol="NVDA", quarter="Q2", year="2024")final_one_pager = f"""# {symbol} Earnings One-Pager — {quarter} {year}## Prepared Remarks — Key Points{prepared_summary}## Q&A Highlights{qna_summary}""".strip()print(final_one_pager[:1200]) # preview Tips that keep quality high: Keep temperature low (≈0.2) for factual tone. If a section is extremely long, chunk at ~5–8k tokens, summarize each chunk with the same prompt, then ask the model to merge chunk summaries into one section summary before producing the final one-pager. If you also fetched headline numbers (EPS/revenue, guidance) earlier, prepend them to the prompt as brief context to help the model anchor on the right outcomes. Building the End-to-End Pipeline At this point, we have all the building blocks: the FMP API to fetch transcripts, a cleaning step to structure the data, and Groq LLM to generate concise summaries. The final step is to connect everything into a single workflow that can take any ticker and return a one-page earnings call summary. The flow looks like this: Input a stock ticker (for example, NVDA). Use FMP to fetch the latest transcript. Clean and split the text into Prepared Remarks and Q&A. Send each section to Groq for summarization. Merge the outputs into a neatly formatted earnings one-pager. Here’s how it comes together in Python: def summarize_earnings_call(symbol, quarter, year, api_key, groq_key): # Step 1: Fetch transcript from FMP url = f"https://financialmodelingprep.com/api/v3/earning_call_transcript/{symbol}?quarter={quarter}&year={year}&apikey={api_key}" resp = requests.get(url) resp.raise_for_status() data = resp.json() if not data or "content" not in data[0]: return f"No transcript found for {symbol} {quarter} {year}" text = data[0]["content"] # Step 2: Clean and split clean_text = re.sub(r'\s+', ' ', text).strip() if "Question-and-Answer" in clean_text: prepared, qna = clean_text.split("Question-and-Answer", 1) else: prepared, qna = clean_text, "" # Step 3: Summarize with Groq prepared_summary = summarize_section(prepared, symbol, quarter, year) qna_summary = summarize_section(qna, symbol, quarter, year) # Step 4: Merge into final one-pager return f"""# {symbol} Earnings One-Pager — {quarter} {year}## Prepared Remarks{prepared_summary}## Q&A Highlights{qna_summary}""".strip()# Example runprint(summarize_earnings_call("NVDA", 2, 2024, API_KEY, GROQ_API_KEY)) With this setup, generating a summary becomes as simple as calling one function with a ticker and date. 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