A privately held startup company valued at one billion dollars or more is known as a unicorn. The name comes from the idea that such companies were once as rare as the mythical animal. Investors typically arrive at this figure during a major funding round, rather than from the public share price. Yesterday Nigeria added its sixth technology unicorn when Moove closed a large new investment.
Moove, the mobility company founded in Lagos by Ladi Delano and Jide Odunsi, raised $250 million in a Series C round. The deal places the company’s value at 2.1 billion dollars. Abu Dhabi’s Mubadala Investment Company led the round, with Toyota’s growth fund Woven Capital and Ion Pacific as co-leads. The money will help Moove move beyond its original work of financing cars for ride-hailing drivers. The company now plans to build what it calls “Nests” — special depots filled with robots that will charge, service and manage fleets of driverless vehicles around the clock.
A Surprising Pattern Among Nigeria’s Unicorns
Delano and Odunsi already had business experience when they started Moove. That makes them unusual in Nigeria’s small group of unicorn founders. A close look at the six Nigerian companies that have reached the one-billion-dollar mark reveals something striking. Most of the people who built these firms had never started a company before.
The six companies are Interswitch, Opay, Andela, Flutterwave, Moniepoint and now Moove. Five of them were founded or co-founded by Nigerian citizens. Opay stands apart because a Chinese entrepreneur named Zhou Yahui created it. He brought experience from earlier ventures in Asia.
When OPay is set aside, the picture becomes even clearer. Twelve people of Nigerian origin signed the first company papers for the remaining five unicorns. Nine of those twelve were launching their first startup. The only founders with earlier company-building experience are Moove’s Delano and Odunsi, and Flutterwave’s Iyinoluwa Aboyeji, who had co-founded Andela years earlier. At Interswitch, Andela and Moniepoint, every member of the original founding team was a first-time entrepreneur.
This pattern runs against what many people expect in older technology centres. In places like Silicon Valley, investors often prefer founders who have already built and scaled companies. Experience is seen as protection against common mistakes. Nigeria’s results tell a different story. The huge unmet needs inside the country appear to give first-time founders a real chance.
Read Also: How Lagos-based Startup, Cybervergent, Secured $3 Million In Funding
Why First-Time Founders Succeed in Nigeria
Large numbers of people still lack basic financial services. Roughly sixty million Nigerian adults do not have bank accounts. Similar gaps exist in payments, transport and other everyday services across the continent. These gaps create room for new companies that solve real problems for millions of people. Strong execution and deep understanding of local conditions often matter more than a long list of previous startups.
Interswitch offers one clear example. Mitchell Elegbe and his co-founders Akeem Lawal and Charles Ifedi started the company in 2002 as complete newcomers to entrepreneurship. It took them seventeen years to reach unicorn status in 2019. Today the company processes payments across more than thirty African countries.
Moniepoint followed a similar path. Tosin Eniolorunda and Felix Ike founded the company in 2015, also as first-time entrepreneurs. They focused almost entirely on Nigeria and built the business steadily for nine years before it became a unicorn in 2024. Once again, big foreign capital arrived after the company had already proved itself on the ground.
Other routes have been faster. Opay reached the milestone in about three years. Flutterwave did it in five by expanding quickly across Africa and beyond while raising large funding rounds. Andela, the education-technology company in a group mostly filled with financial-technology firms, took seven years. Moove itself needed six years. It now runs about forty-two thousand vehicles in twenty-nine cities across thirteen countries and generates roughly four hundred and twenty million dollars in annual recurring revenue. Its path mixes the experience of serial founders with the wide-open market that existed when the company began in 2020.
Global Investors Place Serious Bets on Nigerian Builders
The list of investors in Moove’s latest round shows how much confidence global money managers now place in Nigerian technology companies. Alongside Mubadala sit Toyota’s investment arm, Uber (for which Moove is the largest fleet partner worldwide), BlackRock, MUFG, Franklin Templeton and the Ontario Power Generation Pension Plan. Moove plans to increase the number of people working on its autonomous vehicle side by more than two hundred and twenty per cent, growing that team from about one hundred and fifty people to roughly five hundred by the end of the year.
Each new deal strengthens the belief inside Nigeria’s technology community that companies built by local founders can reach global scale. For a long time, foreign capital largely decided which African startups would succeed. That is changing. Local entrepreneurs have earned the trust of sovereign wealth funds, car manufacturers and big asset managers. Moove’s funding, which brings together money from the Middle East, Japan, the United States and elsewhere, is the latest proof.
What This Means for the Next Generation
Six unicorns remain a small number on a continent of one and a half billion people. Yet the story behind those six companies carries a clear message. Nigeria’s biggest technology successes so far have not come mainly from a closed circle of experienced founders recycling earlier wins. They have come from people trying for the first time, people who saw that gaps in financial services and basic infrastructure could become businesses of real size and importance.
