The high flying founder of Lagos bike hailing ride startup GOKADA was found dead in his New York apartment, gruesomely murdered in what authorities see as a hit where his limbless, headless torso was found inside his swanky Manhattan condo with an electric saw lying next to the remains. Saleh, 33, a website developer turned venture capitalist until his death was the CEO of GOKADA, a motorcycle-sharing company in Lagos, Nigeria.
GoKada CEO, Fahim Saleh
The discovery was made in a building on E. Houston St. at Suffolk St. on the Lower East side which the entrepreneur reportedly bought for about $2.25 million last year. The New York Police Department (NYPD) was quoted as saying that all of the body parts were found at the scene but declined to give specifics on where. “We have a torso, a head that’s been removed, arms, and legs. Everything is still on the scene. We don’t have a motive,” the statement said.
Detectives were waiting for fingerprint and forensics tests on the body, police sources said. The NYPD went to the seventh-floor condo after the victim’s sister called 911. She came calling Tuesday because she hadn’t seen her brother in a day, then discovered his dismembered corpse, an NYPD spokesman said.
An elevator surveillance camera may have caught the victim’s last moments as it shows the victim getting into the elevator Monday, followed quickly by a second man, dressed in a suit, wearing gloves, a hat and a mask over his face. Saleh has described his history as an entrepreneur in a series of posts on Medium.com. He got his start creating a prank calling website, then moved on to create a motorcycle taxi company in his parents’ native Bangladesh.
It could be recalled that prior to the ban of GOKADA in Lagos following the government’s ban on bike hailing rides by the state government leading to the company enmeshed in a lot of backlash and mass layoffs. This led to speculations that the firm which raised close to $20 million to fund its expansion before the clampdown is in a mess.
Kelechi Deca
Kelechi Deca has over two decades of media experience, he has traveled to over 77 countries reporting on multilateral development institutions, international business, trade, travels, culture, and diplomacy. He is also a petrol head with in-depth knowledge of automobiles and the auto industry
Friends identified the victim as Fahim Saleh, and law enforcement officials said that an electric saw had been found near his torso.
Outside the building on Manhattan’s Lower East Side where a man’s dismembered body was found on Tuesday.Credit…John Taggart for The New York Times
A man’s decapitated, dismembered body was found in an apartment in a luxury condominium building on Manhattan’s Lower East Side on Tuesday afternoon, officials said.
When detectives began investigating, they found the man’s torso and an electric saw nearby, two law enforcement officials briefed on the matter said. The man’s head and limbs were later found in the apartment, a Police Department spokesman said.
There were several large plastic bags in the apartment, and it appeared that some effort had been made to clean up any evidence of what had happened, one law enforcement officials briefed on the matter said.
The police did not immediately identify the man, but several friends who spoke on the condition of anonymity said he was Fahim Saleh, a 33-year-old technology entrepreneur and the owner of the condo where the body was found.
Mr. Saleh’s sister made the gruesome discovery at around 3:30 p.m. when she went to check on him after not hearing from him for a day, the officials said. After finding the body, she called the police, officials said.
The saw was still plugged into an electrical outlet when the police arrived, leading detectives to investigate whether the arrival of Mr. Saleh’s sister at the condo might have interrupted the killing and prompted the killer to flee through another exit, one of the law enforcement officials said.
The medical examiner has not officially determined the cause of death, but police were investigating the incident as a homicide, the officials said.
One of the law enforcement officials said a surveillance camera had captured video of Mr. Saleh in the building’s elevator with another person who was wearing a black suit and black mask.
On the video, the elevator door opens and Mr. Saleh goes into the apartment, the official said. The masked person follows directly behind him, and the two immediately start to struggle, the official said.
The sister is seen on the video arriving a short time later. There is a second way out of the apartment through a service entrance, the official said.
Friends of Mr. Saleh described him as an ambitious man who ran every morning, kept a busy schedule of meetings and often traveled to Nigeria on business. He collected tech gadgets and lived alone with a small dog, Laila, which was found alive in the apartment, they said.
According to a 2016 blog profile, Mr. Saleh was born in Saudi Arabia, and moved with his family quite a bit before settling in Rochester, N.Y., and, later, in Poughkeepsie, N.Y.
The son of Bangladeshi immigrants, he learned to code and began to develop apps as a teenager, his friends said. After graduating from Bentley University in Waltham, Mass., he had early success with PrankDial, an app he invented for making prank telephone calls.
Mr. Saleh’s ride-hailing motorcycle start-up, Gokada, began operating in Lagos, Nigeria, in 2018, and raised $5.3 million in venture capital in June 2019, according to the website Techcrunch. As in many large African cities, motorcycle taxis are common in Lagos because they can zip through traffic-clogged streets.
Mr. Saleh told TechCrunch he planned to use the money to expand Gokada’s fleet and to offer goods and services to its drivers.
“We’re going to start a Gokada club in each of the cities with a restaurant where drivers can relax, and we’ll experiment with a Gokada Shop, where drivers can get things they need on a regular basis, such as plantains, yams and rice,” Mr. Saleh told TechCrunch.
The building where Mr. Saleh’s body was found, at 265 East Houston Street near Suffolk Street, is a 10-story, glass-and-brick structure that is among the high-end residential buildings that have risen in recent years in an area once defined by its tenement housing stock.
Condos in the building feature Italian marble kitchens and master baths, white oak floors and asking prices in the $2 million to $2.5 million range, according to the real website StreetEasy. The website Curbed noted in a 2017 article about that access to the building’s units was via a private, keyed elevator.
On Tuesday evening, detectives and officers, including some with the Emergency Service Unit’s canine team, had the corner at East Houston and Suffolk Streets cordoned off.
As some officers stood in front of the building, another led a German shepherd back and forth near the building, with the dog sniffing at garbage bags and a side entrance.
Reporters and cameramen stood on Houston Street and across from the building on Suffolk, while patrons sat in the outdoor dining area of a Suffolk Street bar called Subject sipping drinks as more officers arrived.
Leslie Feinberg, who owns the bar with Brian Grummert, said that as “a nosy neighbor,” she had walked over to take a look when police cars, ambulances and fire trucks converged on the apartment building several hours earlier.
“I saw a young woman in hysterics” in the lobby, Ms. Feinberg said.
“From my understanding, she found the victim,” Ms. Feinberg said, adding that men whom she took to be detectives had led the young woman from the scene.”
Ms. Feinberg said she had come to know many of the building’s residents during the three years she has operated the bar. She described them as mostly well-off professionals in their 30s and 40s.
Word spread quickly that something bad had happened in the apartment building, she said.
“This neighborhood is very tight-knit,” she said. “It seemed within moments everybody knew what was happening.”
Her own reaction, Ms. Feinberg said, was “total shock.”
“You kind of forget New York City is New York City sometimes,” she said.
Charles Rapulu Udoh is a Lagos-based lawyer who has advised startups across Africa on issues such as startup funding (Venture Capital, Debt financing, private equity, angel investing etc), taxation, strategies, etc. He also has special focus on the protection of business or brands’ intellectual property rights ( such as trademark, patent or design) across Africa and other foreign jurisdictions. He is well versed on issues of ESG (sustainability), media and entertainment law, corporate finance and governance. He is also an award-winning writer
Who says giving Nigerian notorious okada riding business model a new repackaged outlook cannot be a viable business model?
Nigerian Lagos-based on-demand motorcycle taxi app Gokada has proven to be up to the game. The startup has just raised US$5.3 million in Series A funding with a plan to expand the number of its motorbikes and available drivers, increase its daily ride numbers as well as grow its team.
Gokada Is Just A Year And Three Months Old
Although Nigerian commercial city, Lagos, has banned motorcycles from plying its major highways, Gokada, defied this rule and formed itself into a more refined business model in February 2018, with a neat, safety-driven business model and more trained drivers.
Customers who need rides in the heavily congested commercial city and the smallest Nigerian state in terms of land mass with a population of 17 million people, can just download Gokada app on their smartphones, or visit Gokada’s website and input their locations and destinations and they would be matched with an available Gokada motorbike. The startup did all that magic in just a year and three months. It secured close to 1,000 bikes and completed around 5,000 rides across Lagos’ Mainland each day, with rides approaching one million in total.
The latest funding is part of the startup’s plan of expanding. Gokada is trying to play a safe game with its highly dangerous business model that demands well-trained drivers.
Govenment’s rule against the use of motorbikes on the highways of Nigeria’s most populous city is so tight. Recently, the Lagos State Task Force on Environmental Sanitation and Special Offences impounded 115 motorcycles, including 22 branded commercial motorcycles, including ‘Gokada’ and its competitor ‘Maxokada’, for violating the state road traffic laws.
The new funding was mostly led by Rise Capital with Adventure Capital, First MidWest Group, IC Global Partners and other several local investors joining. The impact of this round of investment is expected to be felt in the areas of its fleet of drivers, who are sometimes thousands of kilometers away from the location of the hailers.
The startup would also target an increase in the number of its daily rides. At least a 10% increase won’t be bad. In the long run, it is also looking at acquiring more local tech talent who would have to do some jobs about the highly faulty application upon which the startup runs its business. It also intends to explore new verticals for business growth, and provide more value added services to drivers.
Gokada’s biggest competitor is Maxokada which is a bit older, having been founded in 2015, although its initial focus was on-demand delivery where order or packages are delivered in no more than 3 hours. Maxokada may have to fight to retain its market share with its higher pricing model compared to Gokada which is relatively cheaper, although it has better app functionality, and has nearer drivers.
“Our green Gokada motorcycles have become a regular feature of Lagos’ roads in the 14 months since our official launch. Gokada was built with the intention of becoming the future of two-wheel transport in West Africa, and we are fast becoming the go-to platform to hail a motorcycle ride in Lagos. Today’s announcement allows us to accelerate our growth projections significantly, as we continue to grow our market share and look to introduce more product features and services,” said Fahim Saleh, co-founder and co-CEO of Gokada.
The Startup Did Not Take The New Funding For Free Though
With the largest investment from Rise Capital, Mr Ayodeji Adewunmi, director at Rise Capital and the co-founder and former CEO of Jobberman, would be displacing former CEO Deji Oduntan. Adewunmi would be taking over as Gokada’s Co-CEO, a role previously performed by Deji Oduntan.
“It is an incredible time to be joining Gokada on this journey to transform transportation in Nigeria and the rest of Africa. I am truly excited about the promise of Gokada becoming the operating system of how cities function optimally and efficiently across Africa. There is no doubt in my mind that this will become one of the most important companies in Africa,” Adewumni said.
Nazar Yasin, founder and managing partner at Rise Capital, said Gokada’s rapid entry into Lagos’ transport market had been transformative.
“We have noticed that some markets like Nigeria and Indonesia, which both have large populations and inadequate road infrastructure, are more likely to be dominated by motorcycle-hailing companies rather than traditional car-hailing players, and Gokada’s relentless focus on product, customer service, and safety has enabled them to take advantage of this dynamic and produce some truly impressive growth metrics. They are reshaping the tech-enabled transport market in Lagos, and we are excited to be partnering with them as they scale,” he said.
In the meantime, this is a big win for the young Nigerian startup. However, there is still so much work to be done to convince the government that it is worthy to be spared from the long-standing ban against local motorbikes on Lagos’ major roads. This would be a highly defining moment in its next ten years’ future as it looks to build a sustainable business. With high emphasis on safety of both its users and other road users and its appreciably cheap fares, the startup would hope to convince Lagos residents that it is a good alternative to the reforming Lagos transport system and the burning agony of spending several hours on Lagos traffic, in a city that is the smallest in Nigeria and that actually would take about three hours to go round in a mini van with an average speed limit.
According to Nigeria Watch Database, Traffic accidents account for the most fatalities in Nigeria. In 2015, FRSC stated that 5440 people died as a result of car crashes.
(c) Proshare Nigeria, 2017
Charles Rapulu Udoh
Charles Rapulu Udoh, 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 organisations 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.
