A startup that began in Lagos financing cars for Nigerian ride hailing drivers is now worth 2.1 billion dollars and setting its sights on building the global infrastructure layer for autonomous mobility. Moove has just closed a 250 million dollar Series C round, one of the largest funding rounds ever raised by an Africa founded company, and a strong signal of the continent’s ability to produce technology players that compete on a global scale.
Moove was founded in 2020 by Ladi Delano and Jide Odunsi in Lagos, built around a simple idea: let mobility entrepreneurs who are often shut out of traditional banking systems own their own vehicles through financing based on their actual earnings rather than a credit history. In practice, the company relied on an alternative credit scoring system plugged directly into ride hailing platforms, allowing it to assess customers who had until then been invisible to conventional financial institutions.
Five years on, the company has changed scale and ambition considerably. Moove now manages around 42,000 vehicles across 29 cities in 13 countries, employs 3,300 people, and generates 420 million dollars in annual recurring revenue. More strikingly, it has repositioned itself on entirely different ground: managing autonomous vehicle fleets through a partnership with Waymo, already running in Phoenix and Miami, with London lined up as its next step into international markets. Uber remains its largest global fleet partner.
This 250 million dollar round, which brings the company’s total funding raised to more than 710 million dollars, was led by Mubadala Investment Company, Abu Dhabi’s sovereign wealth fund, alongside Woven Capital, Toyota’s growth fund, and Ion Pacific, with participation from BlueCrest Capital Management and Sona Capital.
For Ladi Delano, Moove’s co founder, the logic follows a pattern typical of major technological shifts, an infrastructure race. As he puts it, every major technological revolution becomes an infrastructure race, and autonomy requires fleets, charging, maintenance, data systems and around the clock operations, which is exactly what Moove is building. The funds raised will go toward expanding the autonomous vehicle business, building additional infrastructure, including charging stations the company calls « Nests, » and entering new markets. Moove also plans to grow its autonomy focused workforce by more than 220 percent, from 150 to 500 employees by the end of 2026.
On the investor side, Mubadala’s Ali Eid AlMheiri frames the funding as support for scaled deployment at Moove, while also strengthening the UAE’s position in advanced technology.
Beyond Moove itself, this funding round points to a rare trajectory for a company born on the African continent: moving from a model built to solve a very local problem, car financing in Lagos, to a global platform now backed by some of the world’s largest investment funds. It comes at a moment when funding for African startups is being reshaped by the global AI boom, with international capital increasingly concentrated on technology companies capable of competing on global markets, Moove among them.