Why Moove is leaving Nigeria, the country where it all began

Some exits are announced quietly. Moove chose to turn its into a gift. On Thursday, October 8, the company founded in Lagos in 2020 by Ladi Delano and Jide Odunsi confirmed it was ending its operations in Nigeria. The cars its customers are still driving, valued at about ₦35 billion (roughly $26 million), are theirs. No further vehicle payments are due from October 1. Every employee also leaves with a car.

The programme is called “Thank You Nigeria”. It comes with conditions: only “eligible” customers qualify, and anyone with arrears from before October 1 must clear them before ownership is transferred, TechMoran reports. “Nigeria will always be where Moove started,” the company said. Behind the line lies a colder fact: its Nigerian model had stopped working on September 2, the day Uber left the country.

A lender that could only see through Uber

To understand why, go back to the original product. When the International Finance Corporation (IFC), the World Bank’s private-sector arm, invested in 2021, it described a loan covering up to 95% of a car’s price, repaid over two to four years. Drivers paid with a share of what they earned each week on the app. No payslip, no bank file: the trip history served as the guarantee.

The system required one thing: that the driver worked for Uber, and only Uber. Moove shared offices with the platform in Lagos, Johannesburg and Accra. In 2022 it said it could not assess borrowers who drove on several apps at once. Exclusivity wasn’t a detail of the contract; it was the contract. Uber understood that well: in March 2024 it led a $100 million round in Moove at a $750 million valuation and owns more than 10% of it. It was Uber’s first investment in an African startup.

On September 2, Uber stopped taking trips in Nigeria, twelve years after arriving in Lagos. Within hours, Moove allowed its drivers to work on Bolt and inDrive, something they had demanded for years. The drivers’ problem was solved. Moove’s was just beginning: without Uber’s data, there was no way to know who earned what, or to take repayments at source. Delano was blunt. “Uber was the principal platform supporting our Nigerian model at scale, so its departure had a significant effect on the business,” he said. The company says it looked at other options before giving up.

Repaying in dollars, earning in naira

Uber’s exit only sped up a story that had been creaking for a long time. Moove bought part of its Nigerian fleet with dollar debt while its drivers were paid in naira. Each slide in the currency widened the gap. In 2023, the end of the petrol subsidy sent pump prices soaring just as the naira was plunging: drivers’ margins were squeezed from both sides.

Figures gathered by TechCabal show the strain. In February 2023, a driver paid ₦9,400 a day for a small Suzuki SUV priced at ₦11.7 million, when the same model sold for ₦9.9 million at the dealer. By 2025, the weekly payment had gone from ₦56,400 to ₦112,200. It had doubled in local currency but was worth less in dollars: about $74 a week, against $87 two years earlier. Seen from Lagos, the lender was tightening the screws. Seen from Dubai, it was losing money.

Drivers went on strike. The Lagos chapter of the Nigeria Labour Congress, the country’s main union federation, planned a protest outside Moove’s offices. The company remotely disabled and repossessed cars from customers who fell behind, then cut some instalments. In January 2025, drivers told Technext that Uber rides were drying up. Some even accused Moove of sending fake passengers to check they weren’t secretly driving for inDrive. Uber, for its part, kept its distance during the 2023 protests, talking about concerns from “a small group of drivers”.

A unicorn whose future lies elsewhere

Moove can afford to leave because Nigeria no longer counts for much in its accounts. In August, it raised $250 million from Abu Dhabi sovereign fund Mubadala, with Toyota’s Woven Capital and Ion Pacific, at a $2.1 billion valuation. It reports about 42,000 vehicles in 29 cities across 13 countries, some 3,300 staff and $420 million in annual recurring revenue, after buying Brazil’s Kovi and Tokyo Taxi. Its headquarters are in Dubai.

Above all, its business has changed. Since December 2024, Waymo, Alphabet’s self-driving unit, has paid it to run its fleets in Phoenix and Miami: depots, charging, maintenance. London is next. The August money will fund “Nests”, highly automated depots for robotaxis. None is planned in Nigeria, where the conditions for driverless cars at scale are not there. Keeping a unit that lends to ride-hailing drivers paid in naira made little sense any more.

Hence the gift, which also looks like the cheapest way out. Without Uber, Moove would have had to chase naira repayments from drivers scattered across Bolt and inDrive, in a country no longer among its priorities, with lawsuits to follow and its image damaged everywhere else. By writing off the instalments, it ends years of conflict and leaves with a good story. Is it generous? That depends on a number the company hasn’t shared: how much its customers still owed on October 1. Moove publishes no country-level figures on vehicles, outstanding loans or arrears.

According to the company, more than 9,000 people used its products in Nigeria and its cars generated about ₦57 billion in revenue. “Those numbers matter because they represent people earning, supporting their families and building their own futures,” Delano said.

What changes for drivers

For those who keep their car, it is a real relief: no more payments, and the freedom to drive for anyone. But the market they return to is narrower. Bolt and inDrive have promised to stay and take on Uber’s drivers and riders. LagRide, the service backed by Lagos State, has secured a $100 million credit line from United Bank for Africa to put 3,500 gas-powered cars on the road. More drivers on fewer apps usually means fewer trips each. Fuel is still expensive, the naira weak, and riders count every kobo.

Tempers have not cooled either. The app-based transport workers’ union, AUATON, had asked Moove and other financiers, including LagRide, for a pause in daily payments ahead of a work stoppage on Bolt and inDrive announced for October 12.

The lesson goes well beyond Moove. The company proved you could lend to people banks ignore by reading their income in an app. It is now showing the limit of that approach: when a single platform supplies the income, the data and the means of collecting repayment, its departure takes everything down with it. NeoFleet, which finances taxi fleets in Senegal and Côte d’Ivoire and raised $4 million the same day, has chosen to lend to operators rather than drivers. Lenders working with Yango, Heetch or Bolt in Dakar and Abidjan would do well to look closely at what just happened in Lagos.

« We started with 76 vehicles in Lagos and a belief that hardworking Nigerian mobility entrepreneurs deserved access to the vehicles and finance they needed to build their businesses. »

Ladi Delano, Moove co-founder