Africa’s number one motor cycle hailing company — Safeboda has finally launched in Nigeria. The motorbike-hailing startup started in Uganda. Early this year, the company announced it was expanding to Kenya and now making Nigeria its third country of operation. The company joins the likes of MAX, Gokada and ORide that are operating in the sector.
In May this year, the company announced that it will launch in Nigeria, this announcement was followed by a massive recruitment of top talent and appointments globally as far as Europe scouting 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.
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Safaboda enters the Nigerian market that has a busy tech ecosystem. Its biggest competition in Nigeria constitutes the likes of MAX, a company that recently raised $7 million and also has plans to add electric motorcycles to its fleet, Gokada raised $5.3 million in Series A funding. There is also ORide which at launch accrued a large portion of the bike-hailing market share.
In August this year, according to TechPoint, there seemed to be friction between the SafeBoda Nigeria management team, executives, and investors regarding what operational model to go to market with. It is 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.
To give some context, companies like Uber register car owners as drivers on their platforms; they do not own the cars but market them as Uber/Taxify vehicles. This is wht i called the aggregator model of running busy. Motorcycle hailing platforms in Nigeria, on the other hand, own their bikes and only lease them out to drivers under “Asset Financing Contracts”. Payment is made in installments over a specified period. In Nigeria, such model is only sustainable for car-hailing (think: Uber, Taxify, GidiCab, etc.) because a large portion of the populace and road users, own cars — not motorcycles. These are some of the issues why the launch of Safeboda in Nigeria has delayed.
