Moove, an African mobility fintech, today announced that it has raised $23 million in Series A funding. The round was led by Speedinvest and Left Lane Capital, with participation from numerous other companies.
This brings Moove’s total funding to $68.2 million, including $28.2M in equity and $40.0M in debt. Moove is the first investment in Africa for many of its U.S. VC backers, underscoring the opportunity for a platform like Moove to address the continent’s vehicle financing gap.
Moove operates on a continent with more than a billion people who have limited or no access to vehicle financing – and the lowest per capita vehicle ownership in the world.
The market opportunity is vast as Africa is home to 1.3 billion people, with 43 per cent in urban areas and growing, and in 2019 had fewer than 900,000 total new vehicle sales compared to 17 million in the U.S.
Moove embeds its alternative credit-scoring technology onto ride-hailing and e-logistics platforms, which allows access to proprietary performance and revenue analytics of mobility entrepreneurs to underwrite loans.
Moove’s model is to provide loans to its customers by selling them new vehicles and financing up to 95 per cent of the purchase within five days of sign up.
Customers can choose to pay back their loans over 24, 36, or 48 months, using a percentage of their weekly revenue. All their customers can sign up to the Moove app to manage all transactions and access other financial products on the platform.
The fintech is a mission-led company that’s committed to giving 100 per cent of mobility entrepreneurs’ access to affordable credit and ensuring that 50 per cent of its customers are women.
It also aims to ensure that at least 60 per cent of the vehicles it finances are electric or hybrid vehicles as part of its commitment to improving road safety and vehicle emissions on Africa’s roads.
Co-founders Ladi Delano and Jide Odunsi are British-born Nigerians, educated at the London School of Economics, Oxford University and MIT, who have successfully built three other businesses in Africa over the last eight years through their venture studio, Grace Lake Partners.
Ladi is a serial entrepreneur and Jide is a former investment banker at Goldman Sachs and former management consultant at McKinsey. Driven by a common passion to create shared value leveraging their extensive operating experience on the continent, they set out to build Moove to provide Africans with a path to new vehicle ownership while creating new jobs.
“In a continent full of opportunity, mobility is key to moving economies forward and this funding contributes to our ability to provide revenue-based financing, as Moove empowers Africans to safely become mobility entrepreneurs,” said Ladi Delano, co-founder of Moove. “We help people buy new cars who otherwise couldn’t afford them. And then, using the vehicle as a mobility entrepreneur, they’re able to earn money, which allows them to pay off the vehicle over time.”
Moove is Uber’s exclusive vehicle financing and vehicle supply partner in sub-Saharan Africa, with Moove-financed cars having completed more than 850,000 Uber trips covering over 13 million kilometers across the continent to date.
The start-up was initially bootstrapped by its co-founders with seed stage funding from Future Africa, an Africa focused fund led by Iyin Aboyeji, who was a founder at Andela and Flutterwave.
The new Series A funding will allow Moove to grow and expand into new markets as well as develop and launch new products and services. The equity raise follows a year of momentum and success for Moove with the launch of three cities and 60% month-on-month growth so far.
