Welcome back to Data Under Glass, the place where we strip away theory and talk about how companies actually survive.
For the last decade, venture capital pushed one doctrine everywhere: stay asset-light.
✗ No warehouses in Lagos.
✗ No trucks in Atlanta.
✗ No hardware anywhere.
That advice worked when capital was cheap and infrastructure mostly worked.
In 2025, it’s backward.
The most defensible businesses, from Nakuru to Nashville, Cape Town to Columbus, aren’t built on top of infrastructure. They are the infrastructure. They step into the gaps others avoid and turn friction into moat.
This is Infrastructure Arbitrage.
And it’s winning quietly across continents.
Today, you’re getting two operator playbooks:
• An $8.4M African last-mile siege
• An $18.5M Midwest cold-chain build
Same logic, different terrain. Identical outcome: uncopyable advantage.
— Anderson Oz'.
From The Operator's Desk
The African Last-Mile Siege
Case In Point: Logistics operator (Series A; East Africa + South Africa)
The Gap:
E-commerce demand exploded outside Tier 1 cities. Nakuru, Mwanza and Secondary South African metros.
Delivery was chaos, no addressing systems, unmapped roads and unreliable third-party riders.
Everyone chased Nairobi and Dar es Salaam. Nobody wanted the periphery, it was “too expensive.”
The Heavy Play:
$8.4M deployed into assets nobody wanted to touch:
12 micro-fulfillment warehouses in underserved cities
1,200 owned motorcycles, not rented
Proprietary routing and address logic built for unmapped terrain
This wasn’t software first. Software came after steel, fuel, and maintenance.
The Moat:
78% market share captured in 18 months.
To replicate the network today would cost over $20M at 2025 prices, plus years of learning curve. By the time incumbents reconsidered those cities, the operator already owned the customers, riders, and routing data.
Asset-light competitors couldn’t follow. They had nothing to stand on.
The North American Cold-Chain Play
Case In Point: Cold-storage infrastructure fund (Series B; $45M, U.S. Midwest)
The Gap:
Regional food producers were shipping perishables 200+ miles to Chicago or Atlanta for storage, then hauling them back for local distribution. A massive logistics tax baked into every pallet.
Over 70% of U.S. cold storage is more than 20 years old. Built pre-ecommerce. Energy-inefficient. In the wrong places.
The Heavy Play:
$18.5M invested into a 200,000 sq ft automated cold hub in a Tier 2 logistics corridor (Indianapolis, Columbus, Des Moines).
Automated Storage & Retrieval Systems
Proprietary thermal-retention optimization
Solar plus battery storage hedging peak energy rates
The Moat:
Customer transport costs dropped 32%.
Once producers integrated directly with the facility’s Warehouse Management System, switching became painful and expensive. Capacity hit 100% in 11 months.
At stabilization, the facility valued at a 6.2% cap rate. Instant ~3x equity multiple. Not because of branding or growth hacks, but because the asset was indispensable.
The Universal Framework: Infrastructure as Arbitrage
Different continents but same playbook:
✓ Find where basic services don’t work.
✓ Deploy heavy capital others refuse to touch.
✓ Own the physical layer everyone eventually depends on.
Build vs. Work Around
The math: If the cost of third-party infrastructure plus the reliability tax
(lost customers, delays, churn) exceeds the amortized cost of building your own, you build.
In Africa, third-party riders failed 40% of deliveries outside Tier 1 cities. Ownership was cheaper in the long run.
In the Midwest, shipping pallets across states cost producers more than local storage ever would.
Infrastructure looks expensive until unreliability shows up on your P&L.