NeoFleet raises $4 million to finance taxi fleets in Senegal and Côte d’Ivoire

The news landed on October 8, the same day Moove confirmed it was pulling out of Nigeria. The timing was a coincidence, but the two stories speak to each other. NeoFleet Capital, a young company registered in Cyprus and active in Senegal, Côte d’Ivoire and Peru, has raised $4 million to buy and finance taxis.

It is a pre-seed round, part equity and part debt. DMTech VC, a fund that backs fintech and asset-based lending, led it alongside private investors. One of them is a familiar name in the industry: Mark Loughran, the former president and chief financial officer of inDrive. He did more than write a cheque. He is joining as president and co-founder, alongside chief executive Igor Shiyanov and Oleg Mosyazh, who started the company in 2024.

Fleet owners, not drivers

The whole bet comes down to who the customer is. Moove lent directly to thousands of drivers. NeoFleet deals with operators who already run taxis and ride-hailing cars. According to the founders, banks have neither the risk models nor the appetite for this business, so these small companies stall for lack of capital. “People need rides, drivers want to work, and capital is the missing piece to put more cars on the road,” Loughran said.

The set-up varies from market to market. Sometimes NeoFleet makes a secured loan to an operator who buys the cars. Sometimes it buys the vehicles itself and rents them to a local fleet. Sometimes it sells them on instalments. It earns interest, fees and rent, and plans to sell the rest later: fleet software, maintenance, insurance. It calls the package a “Fleet Management Franchise”.

The cars are insured and tracked remotely, both their location and their condition. If an operator stops paying, the company says it first tries to agree a new schedule. If that fails, it takes the vehicle back and hands it to another fleet. In this business the car is often the only real collateral, so knowing where it is matters almost as much as the money lent.

The numbers are still small. The network has 650 vehicles today, bought for about $10 million in total. The target is 1,000 by year-end and 5,000 by the end of 2027, or $75 million to $100 million worth of cars. With $4 million of equity and debt, the maths obviously doesn’t add up yet, and growth will depend on much larger borrowing. More than fifteen countries are under review; two or three will be chosen, in Africa, Latin America, Southeast Asia or the Middle East.

The underlying problem is real enough. In sub-Saharan Africa, a car costs about 8% more than the global average, according to 2021 World Bank data compiled by TheGlobalEconomy. For a driver with no banking history, that often puts ownership out of reach.

Shiyanov is also looking further ahead, to driverless cars. In his view, an autonomous fleet will need the same services as a taxi fleet: credit, charging, maintenance, monitoring. “In Africa, we expect human-driven and autonomous vehicles to coexist for some time, but the shift will come,” he said. Dakar is not there yet. The first test will be more down to earth: putting 5,000 cars on the road and getting paid for every one of them.