By The Atlantic Digest Business and Technology Desk
Moove, the mobility company founded in Lagos in 2020, has raised $250 million at a $2.1 billion valuation, officially joining the ranks of Africa’s unicorn startups in what ranks among the largest funding rounds ever raised by a company with African founding origins, and a striking illustration of how a distinctly Nigerian problem, drivers unable to secure vehicle financing from banks, evolved into infrastructure now underpinning autonomous robotaxi operations in the United States.
How it started: solving a local financing gap
Moove was founded in 2020 by Nigerian entrepreneurs Ladi Delano and Jide Odunsi, built around a simple but persistent problem: ride-hailing drivers across Lagos and other African cities frequently could not access vehicle financing from traditional banks, effectively locking capable drivers out of the gig economy despite genuine, steady earning potential once behind the wheel. Moove’s original model addressed this directly, providing revenue-based vehicle financing that allowed drivers to acquire cars using their platform earnings as collateral rather than the credit history or collateral banks typically require. That model proved durable and scalable: six years on, Moove operates nearly 42,000 vehicles across 29 cities in 13 countries, employs 3,300 people worldwide, and has reached $420 million in annual recurring revenue, expanding along the way through acquisitions including Kovi in Brazil and Tokyo Taxi in Japan.
The Series C round: who’s backing it, and at what price
Moove’s new Series C funding round was led by Abu Dhabi’s sovereign wealth fund, Mubadala Investment Company, which first invested in Moove three years ago, and co-led by Woven Capital, Toyota’s growth-stage venture investment arm, and Ion Pacific. New investors BlueCrest Capital Management, Sona Asset Management (referred to in some coverage as Sona Capital) and The Raptor Group joined the round, alongside a deep bench of existing backers: BlackRock, MUFG, Franklin Templeton, Uber, Left Lane, Silverbacks Holdings, Square Associates, The Latest Ventures, Endeavor Catalyst, and the Ontario Power Generation Pension Plan.
The valuation jump is striking on its own terms: Moove’s worth rose from $750 million in 2024 to $2.1 billion in this round, and industry trackers confirm the $250 million raise stands as the largest single funding round announced by an African startup so far in 2026, ahead of EV mobility firm Spiro’s cumulative $270 million raised across two separate rounds this year. The valuation places Moove among a genuinely small cohort of African tech unicorns, joining Flutterwave (roughly $3 billion, currently the continent’s most valuable), OPay, Moniepoint, Andela, Chipper Cash, Wave, Tyme, MNT-Halan and Interswitch, bringing the total number of African unicorns to ten.
From vehicle financing to charging robots: the strategic pivot
The genuinely novel part of Moove’s current story is not the fresh capital itself but the business model shift it is funding. Moove co-founder and co-CEO Ladi Delano described the company’s move into autonomous vehicle infrastructure as originating from a deliberate 2023 outreach effort: “In 2023, we started talking to every single AV company you could imagine, and as you know, God would have it, luck would have it, we managed to partner with Waymo first.” Through that partnership, Moove has become one of the leading third-party fleet managers for Alphabet’s autonomous vehicle unit, with live commercial operations already running in Phoenix, Miami and Las Vegas, and London confirmed as Moove’s first international autonomous operations market, supporting the operational groundwork for Waymo’s planned fully autonomous London rides, which Waymo announced in October 2025 it intends to launch subject to regulatory approval.
Central to this expansion is the “Nest” concept: robotics-first depot infrastructure specifically designed to charge, clean, inspect, maintain and coordinate autonomous vehicle fleets around the clock, essentially the physical backbone that keeps a driverless fleet operational without the human depot staff a conventional vehicle fleet would require. Delano framed the strategic logic in explicitly historical terms: “Every major technology revolution becomes an infrastructure race. The internet required data centres. AI required compute. Autonomy requires fleets, charging, maintenance, data systems and 24/7 operations in every city, and that is what Moove is building. In our view, as autonomy scales, infrastructure ownership and operations will define the category leaders.” Mubadala’s Ali Eid AlMheiri, executive director of diversified assets, echoed this framing from the investor side: “As autonomous mobility moves from innovation to scaled deployment, the infrastructure supporting it becomes increasingly important.” The company plans to scale its autonomous vehicle-focused workforce by more than 220 percent by the end of 2026, growing that specific team from roughly 150 to about 500 people, according to Delano.
An important nuance: this expansion is not African
It is worth noting, in the interest of complete accuracy, a detail the original framing of this story tends to gloss over: Moove’s autonomous vehicle expansion, the specific development funded by this $250 million round, is not occurring in Africa. As one detailed industry account put it plainly, this is “a round that ranks among the largest ever raised by a company with African founding origins… and one whose expansion plans do not include an African market.” The company’s current and planned autonomous operations are concentrated in the United States (Phoenix, Miami, Las Vegas) and now London, with the funding earmarked specifically for expansion into the US, Europe and Asia. Moove’s original, and still substantial, African driver-financing and fleet-management business continues to operate across its African markets, but the Waymo-linked “Nest” infrastructure story, the specific development driving this round’s headline valuation, is an entirely US- and Europe-facing growth story built on African founding talent and original business-model innovation, rather than a business expanding African infrastructure itself.
Why it matters
Moove’s trajectory offers a genuinely compelling case study in how a business model built to solve a specific, local African financing gap, banks refusing to lend to ride-hailing drivers, can generalise into an entirely different, capital-intensive global infrastructure category once the underlying operational competencies, vehicle financing, fleet maintenance, 24/7 logistics coordination, prove transferable to an adjacent and rapidly scaling market. Analysts caution, however, that this transferability carries real financial risk: the shift from financing-based revenue toward direct fleet ownership requires substantially more capital for vehicles, depot infrastructure, charging equipment and staffing, and Moove’s continued growth will depend heavily on the pace at which robotaxi deployment actually scales, the terms of its contracts with partners like Waymo, and its ability to manage increasingly complex fleet operations across a widening set of international markets simultaneously. Whether Moove’s valuation proves durable will likely hinge less on the symbolic power of its founding story and considerably more on execution risk inherent to becoming, in effect, the physical infrastructure layer for an autonomous vehicle industry that is itself still in the early stages of commercial-scale deployment.
