The Nigerian road will see more bike hailing services from next year. Apart from MAX, Gokada and Oride, the latest launch is the Ugandan motor cycle hailing startup Safeboda . Aside from Uganda where it started, Safeboda has expanded to Kenya, making Nigeria its third market in Africa.
Happy New Month Nigeria, your SafeBoda is here — SafeBoda Nigeria@SafeBoda_NGA tweeted
Here Is All You Need To Know
- Safeboda had announced in May, 2019 that it would launch in Uganda. This was followed by a massive recruitment of top talents and appointment globally as far as Europe for several high-profile individuals to join its team in the country. Everything happened so fast that it seemed like the Uganda-birthed start-up was coming to oust existing players in Nigeria’s motorbike-hailing ecosystem.
- Safaboda enters a Nigerian market that has a busy tech ecosystem. This year its biggest competitors in Nigeria like MAX, has raised $7 million and plans to add electric motorcycles to its fleets, Gokada raised $5.3 million in Series A funding, ORide launched and accrued a large portion of the bike-hailing market share, with a pool of over $170 million in new funding.
- In August this year, a friction between the SafeBoda Nigeria management team, executives, and investors regarding what operational model to go to market with was reported. It was understood that SafeBoda investors wanted to commence operations in Nigeria sticking to the “Aggregator Business model” that worked for it (SafeBoda) in Uganda and Kenya.
Aggregator Business Model is a network model where the firm collects the information about a particular good/service providers, make the providers their partners, and sell their services under its own brand.
Motorcycle transit ventures are vying to digitize a share of Africa’s boda-boda and Okada markets (the name for motorcycle taxis in East and West Africa) — representing a collective revenue pool of $4 billion (now) that’s expected to double by 2021, per a TechSci study.
Uber began offering a two-wheel transit option in East Africa in 2018, around the same time Bolt (previously Taxify) started motorcycle taxi service in Kenya.
Charles Rapulu Udoh
Charles Rapulu Udoh is a Lagos-based Lawyer with special focus on Business Law, Intellectual Property Rights, Entertainment and Technology Law. He is also an award-winning writer. Working for notable organizations so far has exposed him to some of industry best practices in business, finance strategies, law, dispute resolution, and data analytics both in Nigeria and across the world