Moove raises $250M at $2.1B valuation for robotaxi push

Moove, founded in 2020 in Nigeria and now headquartered in Dubai, has raised $250 million in a Series C round at a $2.1 billion valuation. Mubadala Investment Company led the round, with Woven Capital and Ion Pacific as co-leads. Co-founder and co-CEO Ladi Delano said the company’s experience in vehicle financing and human-driven ride-hailing fleets was the ideal training ground for its newer push into autonomous vehicles.

Moove is still very much in the human-driven ride-hailing business: it owns and operates a 42,000-vehicle fleet across 14 countries, employs 3,300 people globally, and still provides vehicle financing to gig drivers. Its expansion into autonomous vehicles started in early 2023, after Delano concluded that none of the AV ecosystem’s main players — the AV developers, vehicle manufacturers, marketplaces like Uber, and the consumer — wanted full ownership and operational responsibility for the vehicles themselves. That gap is what Moove’s fleet-management and financing experience is meant to fill.

Moove is now the fleet operator for Waymo in Phoenix, Miami and Las Vegas, and in the future London, though it doesn’t yet own the Waymo vehicles it operates — it plans to purchase them using debt financing, with no disclosed timeline. Delano said Moove already owns robotaxi vehicles from a second, undisclosed AV developer. “Ultimately our vision is to own, you know, hundreds of thousands of vehicles,” he said, referring to robotaxis.

The new funding will scale Moove’s autonomous-vehicle fleet management business, including hiring about 350 people; Delano said the company’s traditional mobility business is set to reach full profitability this year. Some of the capital will also go toward developing automated, round-the-clock depots the company calls “nests,” which use robotics to handle vehicle charging, maintenance and servicing — about 15 are in some stage of development, though Delano gave no timeline for when the fully automated version would launch. Other backers in the round include BlackRock, Uber, Franklin Templeton and MUFG, among others.

Why it matters

Moove is betting that the fleet-ownership and maintenance work no AV developer wants to do in-house becomes its own defensible business, positioning it as infrastructure for the robotaxi industry rather than a competitor to Waymo and its peers.