NeoFleet, a Cyprus-based mobility finance company operating in Senegal, Côte d’Ivoire, and Peru, has raised a $4 million pre-seed to scale its professional taxi fleet financing model and build infrastructure for autonomous mobility.

DMTech VC, a venture fund that focuses on fintech and asset-backed finance, backed the round alongside other private investors. Mark Loughran, former president and chief financial officer of ride-hailing company inDrive, also participated and has joined NeoFleet as president and co-founder. The company said the round consists of a mix of equity and debt. Pre-seed rounds sit at the earliest end of the venture funding spectrum, and the inclusion of debt alongside equity is consistent with an asset-backed lending model in which the financed vehicles themselves serve as collateral.

The raise comes against a backdrop of high vehicle costs in the company’s target regions. Vehicles in Sub-Saharan Africa cost roughly 8% more than the global average, according to 2021 World Bank data compiled by TheGlobalEconomy, which puts the region’s vehicle-price index at 107.74 against a global benchmark of 100. NeoFleet aims to finance drivers and businesses that cannot otherwise access the vehicle funding they need to earn a living. In markets where vehicle prices run high and traditional lenders have been reluctant to underwrite taxi fleets, the upfront cost of a car can keep drivers out of formal ride-hailing and taxi work altogether.

“We address a fundamental problem in many high-growth mobility markets: people need rides, drivers want to work, and capital is the missing piece to put more cars on the road,” Loughran said in a statement.

Founded in 2024 by Igor Shiyanov and Oleg Mosyazh, NeoFleet finances and manages vehicle fleets for professional mobility operators. As of October 2026, the company says its network includes 650 vehicles with an approximate purchase value of $10 million.

The company was built around what it describes as a financing gap: banks often lack the credit models and risk appetite to finance taxi fleets, leaving professional operators with limited access to capital for expansion.

“NeoFleet bridges that gap: we provide professional fleet operators with capital to grow and create the infrastructure that allows institutional capital to access the taxi asset class at scale,” Shiyanov, the company’s chief executive officer, told TechCabal.

NeoFleet said the $4 million will fund the expansion of its existing operations and entry into new mobility markets. It plans to deploy 1,000 vehicles across its network by the end of 2026 and 5,000 by the end of 2027, which it estimates would represent between $75 million and $100 million in vehicle value.

The business is built around what NeoFleet calls a Fleet Management Franchise model, combining vehicle financing, fleet-management technology, operations and maintenance, and insurance. The company says it is developing a technology layer covering fleet and driver scoring, telematics, vehicle monitoring, maintenance management, and payment control.

“We are rolling this model out progressively,” Shiyanov said. “We typically start by financing established fleet operators, then increase our control over the asset through direct vehicle ownership or instalment-sale structures, and ultimately integrate these capabilities into the full Fleet Management Franchise.”

The company does not apply a single ownership structure across its markets. In some transactions, it provides secured financing to an established fleet operator, which then acquires and owns the vehicles. In others, NeoFleet buys the vehicles itself and rents them to local fleet operators. It also uses instalment-sale arrangements, under which operators acquire vehicles and pay over an agreed period. Its customers are primarily professional taxi and ride-hailing fleet operators with limited access to traditional bank financing.

NeoFleet generates revenue through interest and fees on financing provided to fleet operators, as well as rental income from vehicles it owns. As it develops the Fleet Management Franchise, it expects to add revenue from software, maintenance, insurance, and other fleet services.

The company says it has built several layers of protection into its model. Before extending financing, it conducts due diligence and credit assessments on fleet operators, drawing on relationships with ride-hailing platforms and other market data to identify established businesses. Vehicles are insured and monitored through telematics, including location and vehicle-status data.

When an operator falls behind on payments, NeoFleet first works with them to determine whether the problem is temporary and whether the payment schedule can be cured or restructured. If that fails, the company says its security structure and vehicle monitoring allow it to recover the vehicle and redeploy it with another fleet operator.

The model places NeoFleet in a market with larger players attempting to close the vehicle-financing gap, including Moove, a mobility-focused fintech that finances vehicles for ride-hailing drivers, and Autochek, a digital automotive marketplace that also arranges vehicle financing. The company, however, is also making a longer-term bet on how commercial mobility will evolve. It believes the infrastructure required to run today’s professional taxi fleets could become useful for autonomous vehicles: even without drivers, autonomous fleets will still need financing, insurance, charging, maintenance, repairs, monitoring, and day-to-day fleet management. Large-scale autonomous vehicle deployment has so far been concentrated in a small number of markets, led by the United States and China, and none of the countries where NeoFleet currently operates has seen the technology rolled out at scale.

“We believe autonomous mobility will be one the most important structural shifts in transportation,” Shiyanov said. “In Africa, we expect human-driven and autonomous vehicles to coexist for some time, but the shift will come, and the markets that prepare early will be best placed to benefit.”

NeoFleet said it is evaluating more than 15 countries for its next expansion phase and plans to select two to three new markets, focusing on Latin America, Africa, Southeast Asia, and the Middle East. In the longer term, it sees potential in developed markets including the United States, the United Kingdom, and the European Union. The company will continue to expand in Senegal, Côte d’Ivoire, and Peru while assessing those opportunities. The near-term markers to watch are which two or three markets it picks from the shortlist and whether it reaches its 1,000-vehicle deployment target by the end of 2026.

For now, its goal is to turn its existing fleet-financing operation into a platform that connects capital with mobility assets — and to have that same infrastructure ready when autonomous fleets begin scaling across emerging markets.