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  • ✇TechCabal
  • “It started as an embarrassment.”: Day 1-1000 of Advantage Health Africa
    You can order hot jollof on Chowdeck and have it at your door before the steam fades. You can order fresh tomatoes on GoLemon without stepping outside. But if your mother needs hypertension medication at 5 p.m. in Bayelsa?  That question—why the convenience economy stopped short of healthcare—haunted Abimbola Adebakin. A pharmacist with years of experience in organisational strategy and consulting, she’d spent her career build
     

“It started as an embarrassment.”: Day 1-1000 of Advantage Health Africa

26 juillet 2025 à 09:47

You can order hot jollof on Chowdeck and have it at your door before the steam fades. You can order fresh tomatoes on GoLemon without stepping outside. But if your mother needs hypertension medication at 5 p.m. in Bayelsa? 

That question—why the convenience economy stopped short of healthcare—haunted Abimbola Adebakin. A pharmacist with years of experience in organisational strategy and consulting, she’d spent her career building systems behind the scenes. One day, trying and failing to help a family friend find a basic drug after visiting nine pharmacies, she was jolted into a personal embarrassment that refused to let go.

So she built a solution. In 2017, Adebakin launched Advantage Health Africa (AHA) to make accessing quality, affordable medication as seamless as ordering dinner. Through its flagship platform, MyMedicines, AHA delivers prescriptions across Nigeria—even to remote areas—while supplying clinics and pharmacies through a growing B2B distribution network. Today, the company serves over 30 HMOs, moves thousands of orders monthly, and powers an increasingly digitised ecosystem through its proprietary inventory visibility platform, The Advantage.

The road to relevance was anything but linear. Failed products. Broken tech. Layoffs. A near-collapse of their pharmacy network. On today’s edition of Day 1 to 1000, AHA’s founder and CEO, Abimbola Adebakin, walks me through how she built a healthtech company out of frustration, scaled it through a pandemic, and learned when to pivot, when to let go, and when to keep the faith.

This is the story of Advantage Health Africa, as told to TechCabal.

Day 1-1000: From consulting gigs to a tech-enabled pharmacy network

Advantage Health Africa didn’t start with a grand strategy. It started with shame.

A family friend needed a drug. I offered to help. I’m a pharmacist—how hard could it be? I went to a pharmacy. They didn’t have it. I went to another. And another. I visited nine pharmacies across Lagos that day and still came up empty-handed. I was embarrassed. What kind of system was this? What kind of pharmacist was I if I couldn’t find a basic drug?

That moment stayed with me. It opened my eyes to something we all quietly endure: a broken distribution system that forces sick people to wander from pharmacy to pharmacy, hoping to get lucky. I thought: we can’t keep working around this. We have to fix it.

When I started Advantage Health Africa in 2017, we launched with services: consulting, training, anything to keep the lights on while we figured out the bigger thing. We built relationships. We worked with pharmacy associations and regulators. We mapped the territory.

Nine months later, on October 1st, we launched MyMedicines, a direct-to-consumer service that lets people order drugs and get them delivered. That first year, the traction was slow but steady. Then COVID hit.

Suddenly, what we were offering wasn’t a convenience, it was essential. People couldn’t leave their homes. Clinics wouldn’t take non-critical patients. HMOs that previously ignored us came running. “Can your pharmacies deliver?” they asked. “Yes,” we said, because we could.

Revenue jumped 10x. Word of mouth exploded. People abroad were ordering drugs for their parents in Bayelsa, Onitsha, places we could reach in 24 hours. CNN called. The world noticed. And we knew: we’d hit product-market fit.

We pivoted, failed, restructured, and kept going

Before COVID, we’d also tried building a pharmacy franchise called MyPharmacy. But the timing was off. The tech was shaky. COVID made everything harder. We raised some money for it, but within 12 months, we shut it down. Still, the name stuck. People began to refer to us as “MyPharmacy” even after it was gone. And we kept the spirit of the network alive, just not in the format we started with.

That was hard. Letting go of the vision—and letting go of people. But we did it properly. We flew in our field staff, sat them down, and paid two months’ salary. Helped them reposition. Some of them came back later when we were ready to rebuild.

We also tried wholesaling to pharmacies but quickly realised that wasn’t scalable. The margins were brutal. The scale wasn’t there. It was our board that pushed me to switch to selective distribution. They were right. That arm took off once we brought in a seasoned MD with experience in sales and marketing. I had to admit what I didn’t know and hire someone for it. Our branded generics—DHA Plus, Relsid Plus, and others—are now thriving in the market.

I come from an organisational development background. Even in chaos, I knew we needed structure: operating models, culture, systems. We got ISO-certified early on. We let people go when we had to, humanely, and hired back some of them later.

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Day 1000-Present day

We failed twice at building our core tech, then finally cracked it. We tried to build the tech backend—what we now call The Advantage—three times.

In 2018, we partnered with a team from Cape Verde who promised to help after we were selected among Africa’s top 50 startups. It didn’t work. In 2021, we tried again: it was another flop. Finally, we built internal capabilities, paired them with an external developer, and launched a working system in late 2023. Now it powers real-time inventory visibility across pharmacies. It’s the infrastructure we always needed, and we own it.

Today, AHA runs two interlinked businesses:

1. Direct to consumer through MyMedicines, with services like subscriptions, “buy now, pay later,” and doorstep delivery.

2. Business-to-business distribution, supplying select, in-demand drugs to pharmacies, clinics, and hospitals nationwide.

They feed into each other. A prescription generated by an eldercare startup? We fulfill it. A woman in Lagos placing an urgent nighttime order for her visiting brother? We’ve got it covered. One of my favorite memories is delivering meds at 11 pm to a hotel in Ikeja. The customer was stunned that it was even possible in Nigeria.

What I wish I knew earlier and what’s next

I wish we had secured seed funding earlier. It would’ve saved us years of technical debt. But we made do. In 2019–2020, we raised about ₦300 million (~$1M at the time) in naira from angel investors. Since then, we’ve mostly run on cash flow and strategic debt.

There were hard times. There were nights I took on consulting jobs just to cover payroll. One of my staff was working full-time while doing construction gigs to survive. Today, he’s a manager, winning awards, and flying abroad. That grit and belief in the mission got us through.

One of my most euphoric moments in this business was in 2021, when Bayer Foundation selected us for their Women Empowerment Program. It was the pat on the back we desperately needed. After that came Google, the Nigerian Healthcare Excellence Award, and others. We started to believe again.

Honestly, I wanted to quit many times. I got offers to lead global foundations, even drone delivery startups expanding into West Africa. Since I started AHA, I haven’t earned the kind of salary I earned during my Accenture career.  And these companies were offering tempting salaries and steady jobs. But I kept thinking of the scripture that says, “If you’re faithful in another man’s business, God will give you your own.” That promise anchored me.

We’re looking to integrate our services more tightly: create clearer synergies between the B2B and DTC arms. And we’re open to joining a larger ecosystem,a healthtech group where our infrastructure becomes the backbone.

What we’re building is bigger than logistics. Bigger than tech. We’re proving that in Africa, quality health access can reach the last mile and the last metre.

Mark your calendars! Moonshot by TechCabal is back in Lagos on October 15–16! Join Africa’s top founders, creatives & tech leaders for 2 days of keynotes, mixers & future-forward ideas. Early bird tickets now 20% off—don’t snooze! moonshot.techcabal.com

  • ✇TechCabal
  • “When we enter a bank’s boardroom, they know our name. Not our partner’s. Ours”: Day 1-1000 of Union Systems
    In 2024, some of Nigeria’s biggest banks decided unanimously to change core software that powered their banking activities. In the TechCabal newsroom, we embarked on a project in response, to demystify these core banking software to our audience and to explain the implications of the change.  It was after the project I encountered Albert Iloh, who had spent the five years prior selling Union Systems, Nigeria’s first indigenous trade finance software, to banks. I was intrigued by the idea of a
     

“When we enter a bank’s boardroom, they know our name. Not our partner’s. Ours”: Day 1-1000 of Union Systems

5 juillet 2025 à 09:35

In 2024, some of Nigeria’s biggest banks decided unanimously to change core software that powered their banking activities. In the TechCabal newsroom, we embarked on a project in response, to demystify these core banking software to our audience and to explain the implications of the change. 

It was after the project I encountered Albert Iloh, who had spent the five years prior selling Union Systems, Nigeria’s first indigenous trade finance software, to banks. I was intrigued by the idea of a local alternative to international trade finance software like Finacle Trade and Finastra Trade Innovation because local alternatives rarely came up in my earlier conversations with banking experts.

Union Systems’ CEO, Chuks Onyebuchi, is my guest on the Day 1-1000 column. He shares with me how the company, which was first established in 1994 as a local partner to international financial software providers, morphed into Nigeria’s first trade finance system.

This is the story of Union Systems as told to TechCabal.

Day 1: Emerging from the shadows

For more than two decades, Union Systems lived in the shadows.

We were the local face of a global software giant, selling, implementing and supporting trade finance software solutions for African banks. We had no product of our own. Every pitch, every integration, every bank knew us by our partner’s name, not ours. If they ever dropped us, we’d be erased.

But in 2017, we finally got a shot by solving a problem nobody else could solve. That piece  of uncertainty gave us the chance to become a company with a name, a product, and a future. The journey would nearly break us. But it also saved us.

Earlier in 2016 we had helped our foreign partner close a over $30 million banking tech overhaul deal with one of Nigeria’s biggest banks, Zenith Bank. 

The scope was massive: every layer from core banking to trade finance (financial services and products—like letters of credit and guarantees—that help companies buy and sell goods internationally) to treasury, risk, and corporate channels (digital and physical platforms that allow business clients to access banking services and manage their accounts). 

As Union Systems, we were tasked with implementing the International Trade Finance (specialised banking services and tools that support cross-border trade) and Corporate Channels modules. But when we reached user acceptance testing, the bank said something we didn’t expect: the Trade Finance module would not solve their unique needs. Not just in a few places but across more than half of their requirements.

The problem was structural. The bank had previously cobbled together six siloed applications to handle the unique requirements of Nigerian trade finance: form M compliance, bidding processes for FX access, local regulatory reporting etc. These nuances don’t exist in Europe or Asia. The software we were deploying, built for international trade finance, didn’t speak the language of Nigerian regulation.

So the bank came to us: could we unify those six legacy systems into one Nigerian Trade Finance solution and then integrate it with the foreign software?

We said yes. 

We didn’t even know how we were going to achieve it. We had no product or roadmap. But we said yes anyway.

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Day 730: From Zero to Trade-X

We called it Trade-X, short for Trade Extra. It wasn’t yet a product, just a bridge. Our team began meeting with the silo owners, many of whom saw us as a threat to their jobs. They fed us half-truths, vague specs, and occasional sabotage. Still, we kept asking questions, diagramming workflows, writing code.

We worked under an impossibly tight deadline. Zenith Bank, the client, wouldn’t shift their go-live date because it had been approved by the board. Our consultants moved into nearby hotels, working night and day to convert the local operations and write them into a single platform. We were about 30 employees at the time.

Trade-X wasn’t just a plug-in for the bank, it was a survival plan. At that point, our entire revenue came from our foreign partner. But we knew if we nailed this, we’d no longer be “the guys implementing someone else’s software.”

Two years later, Zenith went live. Our foreign partner protested. They sent a formal letter to the bank urging them not to deploy without their approval. But we were on the ground, and the CIO trusted us. The system launched and stabilised. That was the first day we felt like we owned something real. That was one of the happiest moments of my life; I was so relieved. 

But our partners weren’t happy. The scope creep, the growing independence, the fact that a Nigerian company had pulled off what they couldn’t, it strained our relationship.

After we fulfilled all contractual obligations for the Zenith Bank deal, we walked away.

We then productised Trade-X. Not just as a Nigerian trade operations plug-in to international trade finance, but as a modular solution that could plug into any bank’s core, local or global. Our pitch was simple: “Tell us what trade module your core banking uses, we’ll plug Nigeria into it.”

That pitch won us a bid with FCMB in 2020. Our foreign partners also submitted a proposal but we won. Then Coronation Merchant Bank signed on. Again, we went head-to-head with our former principals. And we won again.

FCMB pushed us further. Rather than integrating Trade-X into their existing system, they asked: “Can you write everything that’s missing in Trade-X and make this a standalone trade finance product?”

So we did. What began as a plugin was now a full-fledged end-to-end application.

Day 1096: The Birth of Kachasi

But we had one more evolution to go. The truth is, Trade-X was still written as a plug-in to the trade finance module of a core banking instead of a stand alone product. It was built to take care of the unique Nigerian regulatory requirements which amounted to up to 60% of the Nigerian trade finance operations. We needed to make our product a full end to end trade finance product taking care of both the international and local trade finance requirements. So we paused. We split our teams. While one supported existing clients, another started writing from scratch. The result was Kachasi.

Kachasi was built to be fully independent, process-driven, and modular. It wasn’t just compliant with Nigerian requirements, it was global, service-oriented, multilingual, and front-end configurable. Bank customers could initiate a trade transaction from their office, home and track their progress without entering the bank.

Wema became its first major user then came Fidelity Bank.

We didn’t stop at trade finance. Today, Union Systems builds specialist enterprise banking software solutions, products no Nigerian company had dared touch.

We launched: Egora, a treasury management software that allows banks do front to back-office processing and management of all their financial instruments in one place ; Sakobia, a Swift messaging engine that converts between legacy MT formats and the new ISO 20022 standard; Tentacles, a middleware layer that connects any of our systems to any core banking software; Isura, a real-time support portal and issue tracking knowledge base; Curia, a full-stack judiciary automation platform that digitizes court documents, enabling seamless e-filing, and integrating virtual hearings.

But trade finance remains our beating heart. We now run trade systems for seven Nigerian banks. It’s still our biggest revenue driver and our greatest proof of relevance.

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Present day: breaking the bias

Despite our success, we still walk into meetings where clients ask: “Which part of your software did you build? or “Did you buy foreign IP?

For years, no indigenous company had written enterprise software in these spaces. Trade finance, treasury management, these were domains reserved for foreign vendors. But we knew the local market better. We understood CBN regulations, the FX bidding rituals, the end-to-end regulatory flow. No foreign software does.

Eventually, the market came around. Two banks have now renewed their licenses after five years. Recently, Fidelity Bank reported a 23% growth in the Letters of Credit commission which was attributed to the automation of their trade operations with Kachasi.

We still get pushback. But now we have case studies, references, and metrics. What we no longer need is permission.

The biggest lesson? Don’t give up. I chased that $30 million deal for over two years. When we got the Trade-X letter of award, I didn’t know how we’d pull it off. Even midway through development, when early demos were full of bugs, I thought about quitting. But something told me: if we back down, we lose our chance at identity. Half the time, we were debugging systems full of holes. The other half, we were managing egos, navigating office politics, and pacifying foreign partners who wanted us to stay small.

But we kept moving.

When you’ve been renting your whole life, and someone offers you a sliver of land, you put everything into building on it. We spent every kobo we earned from the $30 million deal reinvesting in Trade-X. We bet the house. And it worked. Today, when we enter a bank’s boardroom, they know our name. Not our partner’s. Ours.

Mark your calendars! Moonshot by TechCabal is back in Lagos on October 15–16! Join Africa’s top founders, creatives & tech leaders for 2 days of keynotes, mixers & future-forward ideas. Early bird tickets now 20% off—don’t snooze! moonshot.techcabal.com

  • ✇TechCabal
  • How Jordan Belonwu taught Nigerian startups to dress with soul: Day 1-1000 of Belonwus
    In Day 1–1000, we follow founders through the raw, unfiltered journey of company-building: the early scrambles, the quiet breakthroughs, the painful pivots, and the milestones that shape what a business becomes. When Lagos-based football club, Sporting Lagos launched its brand new identity—jersey, typography, campaign—the internet exploded. Strangers tweeted: “I think I’ve found my new club.” Others asked, “Where can I buy this jersey?” I was determined to seek out the designer or creative
     

How Jordan Belonwu taught Nigerian startups to dress with soul: Day 1-1000 of Belonwus

14 juin 2025 à 10:50

In Day 1–1000, we follow founders through the raw, unfiltered journey of company-building: the early scrambles, the quiet breakthroughs, the painful pivots, and the milestones that shape what a business becomes.

When Lagos-based football club, Sporting Lagos launched its brand new identity—jersey, typography, campaign—the internet exploded. Strangers tweeted: “I think I’ve found my new club.” Others asked, “Where can I buy this jersey?”

I was determined to seek out the designer or creative studio that had made the club jerseys some of the most desirable pieces of clothing in Lagos. For the first time since I was born, I saw Nigerians wear a local football jersey with pride and style. My quest led to Jordan Belonwu.

It did not surprise me to learn that his studio, Belonwus, was behind other outstanding branding of some of Nigeria’s prominent tech startups, including Zap by Paystack, Grey, JuicyWay and Casava.

Belonwu is my guest today on Day 1–1000. We spoke for nearly two hours—the longest interview I’ve done for this column—and the conversation felt like a masterclass on taste, identity, and proving yourself again and again. During our conversation, Belonwu takes me  from his Blackberry Messenger (BBM) logo days to nearly being fired by fintech company, Bamboo, and running a studio that now chooses who to work with.

Act I — The making of taste

“I think I’ve been designing since I was a teenager,” Belonwu says when I ask where it all started, a mix of happy accidents. He grew up in Lagos, the child of a fine art–appreciating mother. In their home was a computer with illustration software. “I was redrawing the Superman logo on Microsoft Paint before I even knew what design was.” In secondary school, he tried science and failed nearly every subject. “At some point, I realised: I’m not a science student. I’m just not.” He switched to arts and eventually studied Fine Art at the University of Benin.

But even there, he didn’t fit neatly into the system. While his peers painted or sculpted, Belonwu was already using Illustrator and Photoshop, teaching himself software the department dismissed. “We were told to do assignments in CorelDRAW. I was using Illustrator. And the lecturers hated that,” he says.

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He clashed with teachers. He fought for relevance in a system that prized hand-painted poster boards over digital precision. “You’d be asked to paint a Close-Up ad by hand. It wasn’t design education, it was nostalgia training.”

He never stopped designing, though. On BBM, he posted logos he had made for friends. More friends reached out: campus makeup artists, photographers, fashion entrepreneurs. Soon everyone in school knew someone who had a ‘Jordan logo’. “I didn’t know it was brand identity at the time. I just thought I was designing logos.”

What he had—even then—was taste. “Because of my mum, and the artists she knew, I had early exposure to what great art looked like.” That early calibration of the eye, the sense of refinement still anchors his work today.

Act II — The battle for belief

After school, Belonwu didn’t spend a week job-hunting. He texted a designer friend just to say he was open to opportunities and got called in the next day. He was hired immediately. He worked at GampSport, then freelanced, then got pulled into an advertising agency— Image & Time—where he finally saw what real design teams looked like. “It was the first time I realised I wasn’t that good,” he tells me. “Everyone was faster, sharper. That place taught me to work under pressure.”

But it was his next move that almost broke him. Two months into a design role at Bamboo, his output almost got him fired. “I was designing a pitch deck for an investor,” he recalls. “It was terrible. Not good enough. I hadn’t done anything that high-stakes before.” The founder called him in and showed him a better deck: “This was done by someone we didn’t hire. And we hired you.”

He left that meeting unsure if he still had a job. Seeing as he wasn’t asked to leave, he launched a secret redemption plan which he called “Project 27.”

“I messaged everyone—Ope from Paystack, people from Cowrywise, Facebook. I asked for help. I watched YouTube tutorials like my life depended on it.” For two months, he redesigned Bamboo’s branding at night while doing his actual job during the day.

The work paid off. Bamboo kept him. Eventually, they raised a round, expanded into Ghana, and gave him full creative control. “I was creative director. I was the photographer. I was managing decks for Helium Health, designing Money Africa’s visuals every morning, managing Bamboo’s social accounts, and hiring designers. It was insane.”

In 2021, after nearly two years, Bamboo offered him stock options and a bigger role. He turned them down to start his own studio. “I didn’t want to be tied down,” he told me. “I knew I wanted to build something of my own.”

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Days 1–100: Crafting culture beyond the logo

Belonwu didn’t walk out into uncertainty. He had already built enough reputation that projects were lining up. His first client came before the studio had a name. Taeillo, a furniture company, was first. Then cross-border remittance startup, JuicyWay, followed shortly after.

He hired his first employee, Mayowa, who had previously applied for an internship at Bamboo but didn’t get in. Mayowa, joined part-time then became a full-time hire. There was no pitch deck. No org chart. The model was simple: do the work; when it gets too much, hire someone else. The team grew one overwhelmed day at a time.

But the work was undeniable. Series A startups started calling. Zap. Juicy Way. Grey. Bamboo again. And Lagos-based football club, Sporting Lagos. One by one, he became the visual architect of Nigeria’s most design-forward startups.

In the first few months, the studio moved fast. Belonwu and his lean team worked on brand identities, merchandise design, and production design. Soon, he began noticing a trend: the brands that reached out weren’t just interested in design, they wanted distinctiveness. They wanted branding strategy. They wanted to work with a studio that made them feel different.

It was around this time the studio began defining values. What would they say yes to? More importantly, what would they say no to?

That answer showed up when two betting companies reached out. Belonwu says he didn’t decide alone. He asked his team. “I ran a poll. I said: “If you had full autonomy, would you work with a betting company?” Only one person said yes. Everyone else said no. The answer became clear.

He tells me now, almost casually: “Gambling is too dangerous to have great identity.” That line stayed with me.

The make or break Sporting Lagos project

One of his most euphoric—and painful—projects was Sporting Lagos. Midway through the rebrand, the client almost pulled the plug. “They said they might stick with the old identity.”

Belonwu and his team had already worked on it for five months. “I wasn’t even thinking about the money,” Jordan said. “I just couldn’t imagine all this work—the detail, the cultural nuance—not being seen.” He fought for it. He can’t even remember exactly how it got resolved, but the project got back on track. They resumed. And what came out of that work changed everything.

When Sporting Lagos finally launched the new identity—jersey, typography, campaign, everything—the internet exploded. Strangers tweeted: “I think I’ve found my new club.” Others asked, “Where can I buy this jersey?”

Belonwu’s  studio built everything from scratch—the pattern inspired by road markings and Nigerian truck art. The bird motif on the away jersey symbolised migration—a metaphor for fans flocking to this new team.

“We put so much into that identity,” he says, pulling up photos of the moodboards, “the stitched sleeves, the custom typography. Seeing strangers wear it was the highest validation.”

The jerseys sold out. The football club’s social media followers jumped from 4,000 to 17,000. And Jordan, who fought to keep the project alive, finally got to see his work on people. “That’s when I knew. People don’t just want brands. They want brands that feel like them,” he says.

The Sporting Lagos project would later earn Belonwu a referral for the Paystack project. 

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Day 1000

It’s been four years since Belonwu walked away from Bamboo and launched his eponymous studio. Today, the studio employs 12 people. The team has branded some of the most recognisable startups in Nigeria. They’ve made merch, rebranded apps, art directed commercials, built sets, designed exhibition pieces, and made fans fall in love with football jerseys.

“I don’t think we have a style,” he tells me. “Our style is: it must not look like the last thing we did.”

But the company’s proudest shift is that they don’t chase clients anymore. Clients chase them. They don’t run ads. They don’t send pitch decks. Every single client—from Zap to Grey to JuicyWay to Bamboo—has come through referrals. “It’s not about scale. We’re not trying to be Uber. We’re trying to be unforgettable,” he says.

If a startup doesn’t care about design, they politely say no. If they don’t share values—like those betting companies—they walk away.

“Some people don’t understand design,” he said. “And if you don’t, I can’t convince you. Especially when I know it’ll cost you money.”

Present Day

At a talk last year, Belonwu titled his keynote: “We’re Finally Good Enough.” The name came from a moment of vindication when design agency, Wieden+Kennedy London rebranded Upwork using a layout system nearly identical to what his studio had built for Bamboo a year earlier. “I don’t think they copied us. I think we just arrived at the same truth,” he says.

That moment convinced him they were no longer “local” designers. They were global in thought, execution, and ambition. They just happened to be based in Lagos.

When I ask if he feels like they’ve made it, he pauses then smiles. “We used to dream of global relevance. But now we know: we’re already here.”

I ask him what’s next. A bigger studio? Global clients? A product line? He shrugs. “Honestly, I just want to keep proving that Nigerian design can be world-class and still be rooted in culture.”

Mark your calendars! Moonshot by TechCabal is back in Lagos on October 15–16! Join Africa’s top founders, creatives & tech leaders for 2 days of keynotes, mixers & future-forward ideas. Early bird tickets now 20% off—don’t snooze! moonshot.techcabal.com

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  • ✇TechCabal
  • Moove eyes unicorn status with planned $300 million raise
    Moove, the Uber-backed Nigerian startup that finances vehicles for ride-hailing companies, is seeking to raise $300 million in a fresh funding round that could push its valuation past $1 billion, according to The Information. The planned raise comes at a time of rapid expansion for Moove. Last year, the company announced a partnership with Waymo, Alphabet’s self-driving vehicle division, to manage and operate fleets of autonomous vehicles in Phoenix, Arizona, and Miami, Florida. Moove’s respo
     

Moove eyes unicorn status with planned $300 million raise

13 juin 2025 à 06:25

Moove, the Uber-backed Nigerian startup that finances vehicles for ride-hailing companies, is seeking to raise $300 million in a fresh funding round that could push its valuation past $1 billion, according to The Information.

The planned raise comes at a time of rapid expansion for Moove. Last year, the company announced a partnership with Waymo, Alphabet’s self-driving vehicle division, to manage and operate fleets of autonomous vehicles in Phoenix, Arizona, and Miami, Florida. Moove’s responsibilities include cleaning, charging, and storing Waymo’s electric robotaxis, as the self-driving service rolls out commercial operations in new U.S. markets.

Moove has raised $750 million in debt and equity to date, with backers including Uber and Mubadala Investment Company. In 2024, Moove raised $100 million, at a valuation of $750 million, from investors including Uber—which has a stake of more than 10% in the company—and Mubadala Investment Co.

Moove’s growth trajectory has also been fueled by strategic acquisitions. In January, the company acquired Kovi, a Brazilian urban mobility provider that finances ride-hailing drivers, which significantly boosted Moove’s revenue. The company’s annualized revenue has reportedly climbed to $360 million, up from $115 million just over a year ago, largely driven by its core business of extending loans to Uber drivers and its growing fleet management operations in the U.S. The new revenue pace suggests Moove is generating $30 million a month in revenue.

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Founded by Ladi Delano and Jide Odunsi, the mobility fintech buys cars with bank loans and offers them to Uber drivers through a drive-to-own model. Drivers in Africa, India, and the UK pay for the cars out of their earnings and can eventually own them. Moove also recently expanded into robotaxi management, handling cleaning, charging, and storage when the cars aren’t in use. The company employs over 2,100 people worldwide and has recently hired at least 90 staff in the U.S. to support its expanding operations.

This latest funding effort underscores Moove’s ambition to become a key player in the autonomous mobility ecosystem, not only as a fleet operator for Waymo but also by potentially leasing mini-fleets of robotaxis to entrepreneurs and businesses in the future.

Moove’s current agreement with Waymo is confined to fleet management, according to co-founder Ladi Delano. The company is eyeing a broader role in the autonomous vehicle ecosystem, with plans to purchase AV-enabled cars directly from manufacturers and lease mini-fleets of robotaxis to individuals—potentially former ride-hailing drivers—or businesses looking to operate at scale. Moove would continue to oversee depot operations, handling charging, storage, and cleaning for the vehicles.

Mark your calendars!  Moonshot by TechCabal is back in Lagos on October 15–16! Join Africa’s top founders, creatives & tech leaders for 2 days of keynotes, mixers & future-forward ideas. Early bird tickets now 20% off—don’t snooze! moonshot.techcabal.com

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