Why Moove is leaving the Nigerian market it was built in
Six years after Moove put 76 cars on Lagos roads and asked Uber drivers to pay for them out of their earnings, the mobility company is leaving Nigeria, its founding market, and handing many of those drivers their cars.
In a statement on Thursday, Moove said it will hand over eligible vehicles worth about ₦35 billion ($26.3 million) to the drivers, with no further payment due from October 1. Every Moove employee will also get 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.
Moove’s exit is a knock-on effect of Uber leaving Nigeria. If you think of Moove’s Nigerian business as a lending business, then it relied on Uber earnings data to decide who got a car and ensure they kept paying. When Uber left Nigeria, that data went with it, and Moove lost its way to price and collect those loans.
With Moove’s future in robotaxi depots in the United States, its Nigerian business, which faced many challenges, no longer represents a solid business opportunity.
How we got here
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 picked 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 in 2022 said it couldn’t generate the data it needed to underwrite loans if drivers used several ride-hailing apps.
The model depended on two things Moove did not control: Uber’s demand and the naira.
Moove funded part of its Nigerian fleet with dollar-denominated debt while its drivers earned in naira. When the naira fell, it hit Moove’s pricing. In February 2023, TechCabal reported that drivers paid ₦9,400 ($14.57) daily for Suzuki SUVs priced at ₦11.7 million ($18,134). Suzuki’s Nigerian retail price was ₦9.9 million ($15,344).
By 2025, Moove’s weekly remittance had doubled, going from ₦56,400 ($87) to ₦112,200 ($74). At 2025’s average exchange rate, ₦112,200 came to about $74 a week. That is less than the roughly $87 that ₦56,400 was worth at 2023’s rate.
While the naira was in 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.
Uber and Moove’s deep relationship
Uber called Moove 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, owning 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 drivers had demanded for years. That solved the drivers’ problem but ended the single data stream Moove’s lending relied on. By then, Nigeria was already a small part of Moove.
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 in 29 cities across 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.
Today’s handover looks like Moove’s cheapest way out. Without Uber’s data, Moove would have to collect repayments from drivers now working for Bolt and inDrive, in naira, for a company that no longer has Nigeria in its focus.
Giving drivers ownership ends a years-long fight and buys goodwill. Whether it is also generous depends on a number Moove has not shared: how much those drivers still owed on October 1.
Moove started in Lagos by putting cars in drivers’ hands on credit. Delano once said Nigeria taught Moove how to finance and run a fleet, and many of the drivers who paid for that lesson now keep the cars.
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