Egyptian Electric Mobility Startup Shift EV Raises $9m To Scale Business

Shift EV, an Egypt-based electric mobility startup, has raised a total of USD 9 million in finance, putting it on track to revolutionize the EV landscape not only in Egypt, but across emerging countries, using home-grown battery technology. According to CEO and co-founder Aly Eltayeb, Shift’s Series A round was joined by current investors Union Square Ventures, Algebra Ventures, and Wamda, as well as first-time investment Oman Technology Fund, bringing the company’s total funding raised to date to USD 9 million .

Union Square, a tier-one US venture capital investor, is making its first investment in the Middle East and North Africa.

Shift EV
Image credits: Shift EV

A Look At What The Company Does

Aly Eltayeb and Amr Helmy, two young PhDs with global industry experience who formed the company in 2020, have created a retrofitting procedure based on patented Lego-like, locally built batteries that can convert any conventional vehicle into an EV. Shift, on the other hand, isn’t interested in converting any old car. Its plant employs an assembly-line approach to convert fleets of minivans and tricycles into EVs, and it will soon convert pickup trucks and microbuses, which are the backbone of Egypt’s last-mile delivery and passenger fleets, into EVs. The changeover takes less than a few hours per vehicle, which Eltayeb said is “dropping quickly.”

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Charles Rapulu Udoh

Charles Rapulu Udoh is a Lagos-based lawyer, who has several years of experience working in Africa’s burgeoning tech startup industry. He has closed multi-million dollar deals bordering on venture capital, private equity, intellectual property (trademark, patent or design, etc.), mergers and acquisitions, in countries such as in the Delaware, New York, UK, Singapore, British Virgin Islands, South Africa, Nigeria etc. He’s also a corporate governance and cross-border data privacy and tax expert. 
As an award-winning writer and researcher, he is passionate about telling the African startup story, and is one of the continent’s pioneers in this regard. You can book a session and speak with him using the link: https://insightsbyexperts.com/view_expert/charles-rapulu-udoh