Moove, the company that started by financing vehicles for gig drivers in Africa, has raised $250 million in a Series C round led by Mubadala Investment Company, with Woven Capital (Toyota) and Ion Pacific as co-leads. The round values the company at $2.1 billion and funds its transformation into an operator — and eventually an owner — of robotaxi fleets, the infrastructure layer underpinning the autonomous-vehicle boom.
Moove's story is one of early positioning. Founded in 2020 in Nigeria and now headquartered in Dubai, the company operates a 42,000-vehicle ride-hailing fleet across 14 countries and still provides vehicle financing to gig-economy drivers. But in 2023 the company decided to flip the switch: after evaluating the four major players in the autonomous ecosystem — vehicle developers, manufacturers, marketplaces like Uber, and the consumer — Moove concluded that nobody wanted to "own the metal," meaning the vehicles themselves. That's where the opportunity emerged to create a product to "own, operate, and orchestrate" autonomous vehicles.
The result was the partnership with Waymo, Alphabet's autonomous-driving unit. Moove is now Waymo's fleet operator in Phoenix, Miami, and Las Vegas — and, in the future, London. The company does not own Waymo's vehicles, but it plans to: it intends to use debt financing to buy the robotaxis, and it already owns units from another AV developer (which it declines to name). The long-term vision, in the words of co-founder and co-CEO Ladi Delano, is to "own hundreds of thousands of vehicles."
The round will be used to scale the autonomous fleet-management business, including hiring about 350 people, and to develop "nests" — automated depots capable of operating around the clock, using robotics to automate vehicle charging, maintenance, and servicing. Moove has about 15 depots in some stage of development, though the fully automated "lights-out" depots are a future product with no disclosed timeline. Other investors include BlackRock, MUFG, Franklin Templeton, Uber, BlueCrest Capital Management, Sona Asset Management, and the Ontario Power Generation pension plan.
The market context explains the timing. With Waymo expanding into new cities and Uber strengthening autonomous partnerships, the industry realized that the missing layer was exactly the operation and infrastructure piece — who handles charging, cleaning, maintenance, depots, and logistics. Moove bets that its experience managing large human-driven fleets and in financing translates directly into operating autonomous fleets, and the presence of Toyota (via Woven Capital) and Uber as investors signals that the big platforms want to outsource that part to a specialist.
The open question is whether the "own and operate" model will hold up financially as scale grows. Buying robotaxis with debt requires predictable cash flow and a revenue-per-mile that the industry is still defining. If Moove's thesis is right, it becomes essential infrastructure for a sector on track to become a commodity — a thin-margin business but with enormous volume. If it is wrong, it will have accumulated billions in debt on vehicles with uncertain depreciation. For now, the capital and the right partners are on its side. There is also a strategic signal in who is not investing directly in the vehicles: by backing Moove rather than building fleets in-house, Toyota, Uber, and Alphabet signal a preference for a shared, asset-light infrastructure layer. If that bet spreads, it could consolidate the operating side of autonomous mobility into a handful of specialist companies, turning fleet management into a scale business like logistics. That is exactly the kind of consolidation that tends to reward early, well-capitalized movers.
Sources: TechCrunch, The Next Web, Mubadala
✓ Independent sources cross-checked and verified before publishing
