Six years after placing 76 cars on Lagos roads and asking Uber drivers to pay for them out of their earnings, mobility company Moove is leaving Nigeria, its founding market, and handing many of those drivers their cars.

In a statement on Thursday, Moove said it will transfer eligible vehicles worth about ₦35 billion ($26.3 million) to drivers, with no further payments due from October 1. Every Moove employee will also receive a free car. The announcement came five weeks after Uber, Moove's investor and its only ride-hailing partner in Nigeria, exited the country.

"Nigeria will always be where Moove started," the company said in its statement, describing the handover as its way of thanking the customers and staff who built the business.

The exit is a knock-on effect of Uber's departure from Nigeria. Viewed as a lending business, Moove's Nigerian operation relied on Uber earnings data to decide who qualified for a car and to make sure borrowers kept paying. When Uber left Nigeria, that data went with it, and Moove lost its ability to price and collect those loans. With the company's future now anchored in robotaxi depots in the United States, its long-troubled Nigerian business no longer represents a solid opportunity. Uber's exit also leaves Bolt and inDrive, the rivals that had been taking its market share, as the main ride-hailing options in the country.

How the model was built

When the International Finance Corporation (IFC), the World Bank's private-sector lender, invested in Moove in 2021, it described a product that financed up to 95% of a car over two to four years, with drivers repaying a share of their weekly platform earnings. Uber was chosen as the platform.

That same year, Ladi Delano, Moove's co-founder and co-CEO, told Bloomberg that the company used ride-hailing earnings and performance data to make its credit decisions. Moove shared offices with Uber in Lagos, Johannesburg and Accra, and said it had no plans to work with any of Uber's rivals, including Bolt.

The exclusivity was essential to the business model. Moove kept its Nigerian drivers on Uber Go, Uber's budget category, and said in 2022 that it could not generate the data it needed to underwrite loans if drivers used several ride-hailing apps.

In the end, the model depended on two things Moove did not control: Uber's demand and the naira.

Currency pressure and driver unrest

Moove funded part of its Nigerian fleet with dollar-denominated debt while its drivers earned in naira. When the naira fell, the mismatch squeezed Moove's pricing. In February 2023, TechCabal reported drivers paid ₦9,400 ($14.57) daily for Suzuki SUVs priced at ₦11.7 million ($18,134), well above Suzuki's Nigerian retail price of ₦9.9 million ($15,344).

By 2025, Moove's weekly remittance had doubled, from ₦56,400 to ₦112,200. At the 2025 average exchange rate, ₦112,200 came to about $74 a week — less than the roughly $87 that ₦56,400 was worth at the 2023 rate.

As the naira went into freefall, drivers saw a lender squeezing them. They went on strike, and by November the Lagos State chapter of the Nigeria Labour Congress (NLC), the country's largest trade union, was planning a protest at Moove's office.

Demand on UberGo was also thinning. In January 2025, Moove drivers told Technext that ride requests had dried up and some were missing their targets. Some drivers said Moove sent agents posing as riders to catch them working on inDrive. Despite Uber losing market share to Bolt and inDrive, Moove kept its drivers tied to Uber.

A deep relationship with Uber

Uber described Moove as its preferred fleet partner in sub-Saharan Africa. In March 2024, the ride-hailing giant led Moove's $100 million Series B at a $750 million valuation — its first investment in an African startup — taking an ownership stake of more than 10%.

When Nigerian drivers protested unfair working arrangements in 2023, Uber kept its distance, saying it had been made aware of concerns from a small group of drivers.

Hours after Uber's exit on September 2, Moove dropped the Uber-only rule that drivers had demanded for years. That settled the drivers' grievance but ended the single data stream on which Moove's lending relied. By then, Nigeria was already a small part of Moove.

The pivot to robotaxis

In December 2024, Waymo, Alphabet's self-driving car unit, hired Moove to run fleet operations, depots and charging in Phoenix and Miami. In August, Moove raised $250 million at a $2.1 billion valuation, reporting about 42,000 vehicles across 29 cities in 13 countries and $420 million in annual recurring revenue. The new funding will finance self-driving fleets and robot-run depots the company calls Nests. Nigeria is not a destination for any Nest, because the country cannot support the self-driving technology at scale. With its founding market now out of the picture, Moove's growth case rests on how those fleets and Nests take shape in Phoenix and Miami.

Against that backdrop, the handover looks like Moove's cheapest way out. Without Uber's data, the company would have had to collect repayments in naira from drivers now working for Bolt and inDrive, for a business it no longer prioritizes.

Giving drivers ownership ends a years-long fight and buys goodwill. Whether it is also generous depends on a number Moove has not disclosed: how much those drivers still owed on October 1. Either way, the drivers walk away with vehicles free of the weekly remittances and platform exclusivity that defined the loan.

Moove started in Lagos by putting cars into drivers' hands on credit. Delano once said Nigeria taught the company how to finance and run a fleet. Many of the drivers who paid for that lesson now keep the cars.

Source: TechCabal