Long-time readers of InsightEV will know that I have a bias toward Africa. I believe it is the best fit for mass deployment of electric motorcycles. With nearly 80% of all African motorcycles being used as motorcycle taxis, delivery rides, or in some sort of commercial activity, the benefits of going electric far outweigh the pains of doing so.
In recent weeks, I have managed to interview the founders of some of the leading participants in the African e-mobility sector. Just last Thursday, we published an interview with Filip Lövström, the founder and CEO of Roam. A week earlier, we had caught up with Josh Whale, one of the earliest entrepreneurs in Africa, and the founder-CEO of Ampersand.
I have also interviewed Michael Spencer, the founder-CEO of Zeno, twice. The first time Zeno had just come out of stealth mode, and again when they had just started shipping their motorcycles in Kenya.
However, the 800-pound gorilla in the room remains Spiro. Or, as I had written a few weeks back, Spiro is the entire room, and we may be heading for a unipolar situation in Africa. While everyone else has deployed fewer than 10,000 motorcycles each, some much lower than that, Spiro has a target of deploying more than 100,000 motorcycles by the end of 2025. While we have not vetted the progress, the last reported number in the public domain was 60,000 motorcycles. The end-2025 target looks doable – Spiro now has two hardware suppliers.
Arguably, we have not yet interviewed the Spiro leadership yet but I did manage to get a coffee with Gagan Gupta (Equitane) last week. I wish I could call it ‘Coffee with Deepesh,’ but it was his office and his coffee. As expected, the discussion was energetic. Gagan has a vision on a different plane, and while our coffee talk was not an interview and won’t be published on InsightEV, several things that he, and before that Filip, Michael, and Josh, mentioned resonate with me.
Just weeks back, Spiro announced a massive three-digit fundraise that surpasses anything that Africa has seen till now. The fundraiser told us that at least one player in Africa has access to significant capital and has found investors confident about Spiro and Africa. It helps, and annoyingly for everyone else in Africa, that Spiro is owned by Equitane, a very large fund with its own very significant capital to deploy. Even if it does not deploy its own reserves, the comfort from a large fund means other larger players are naturally attracted.
But who said life is fair?
So big was Spiro’s fundraise that we did point out that the motorcycle deployer does not have its startup competition in its crosshairs. It is gunning for Bajaj and TVS, the Indian manufacturers who have split Africa between themselves.
InsightEV – Global Electric Mobility
It is not implausible. The Indians are still napping when it comes to e-Bodas, and the biggest Indian indirect participation is through Gogo Electric, an African startup that uses Bajaj Boxer 150 frames to etch out electric motorcycles.
Different Sizes, Different Trajectories
Back to the discourse with the African trailblazers, it is obvious that everyone is aiming at Africa in their distinct ways. The biggest unanswered question is access to capital for everyone, not named Spiro. Smaller players like Ampersand and Roam are dealing with it in their own way. Roam is raising a round, part of which is crowdfunded. From what we last saw, it seems that the crowdfunding is going on very well, though we cannot speculate on the institutional part of the raise. Roam also has a business model that will burn less cash – they sell the motorcycle and the battery. There is no real swapping; it’s more of a backup battery charging service. This is an attractive model for an investor looking at limiting burn, but a hardball in terms of attracting customers in a geography where vehicle finance rates are even more eyewatering than credit card rates in the rest of the world.
Meanwhile, Ampersand has opened its network to everyone else, basically anyone who would design a motorcycle around Ampersand’s battery pack. This enhances the battery swapping network utilization and limits the capital needed to deploy motorcycles. The first partner is the Chinese factory Wylex, which has rolled out a motorcycle (that interestingly looks more up-to-date than Ampersand’s own motorcycle).
Will more follow soon? I don’t know. It’s not an easy convincing game.
Then there is Zeno, which has traveled a long distance on limited funding. It should be doing its next round now. Amongst all the new entrants, Zeno comes across as the most focused on the product, both hardware and software. While it has preserved and optimised capital till now, a big rollout of motorcycles and a swapping network to match the market potential is going to be capital-intensive. It needs to raise heavily and scale up things. I remain hopeful as Michael has a reputation for scaling up things fast.
Meanwhile, Spiro has gone to the next stage. It has an engineering centre in Pune, India, and another dedicated to battery tech in Bangalore. While engineering and purchasing are handled out of India, the hardware is from the north of the Himalayas, with at least two core hardware suppliers, one being Horwin. Everything is based around the Spiro pack, which is a bit dated; nothing that cannot be rectified, considering the company has money to splurge on battery tech – recent hires include Kevin Konecky, the former battery head of Ola, as the head of battery technology, and Vikas Agrawal, ex-Grab, as its Group CPTO.
In the evolution, Spiro is far ahead, mostly because of the volume it is deploying. It has an agreement with Ace Green Recycling for battery afterlife, something that smaller startups don’t worry about. Then it counts Afrobeats sensation Davido as its brand ambassador and has even launched a Davido collector’s edition motorcycle.
Then, in October 2025, Africa-based mobility newsletter Mobility Rising (great guys) reported that Spiro has signed an agreement with Netherlands-based Zeroca to collect and sell carbon credits in Kenya and Nigeria. Zeroca develops and aggregates carbon credit programs for electric mobility projects. Mobility Rising further reported that a model calculation on the Zeroca website shows that aggregating credits for 35,000 electric motorcycles could generate USD 2.1 million in revenue annually for offsetting nearly 70,000 tons of CO2. If the calculations are correct, then do the same for 100,000 motorcycles. The magnitude is the same as what some of Spiro’s competitors are trying to raise today.
Then do the same calculation for a million motorcycles.
Arguably, these are activities that relatively small startups won’t do because they are not in that phase of life. Which brings me to think that Africa is not even a fair competition now.
Energy Arbitrage Does Not Favour the Small
‘Energy Arbitrage’ is a very popular term in the mobility industry. From Gogoro to every African player, Yuma, BatterySmart, Sun Mobility, and more in India, Honda with its MPP, and many more across the world, electric mobility is increasingly turning into energy arbitrage. In simple terms, it is the money to be gained as the differential between the grid prices you pay and the energy prices you charge from battery swapping. It’s a capital-intensive commodity business that, if done right, can generate a huge amount of money. Like any commodity business, it looks very lucrative on paper and is excruciatingly painful in practice.
Almost everyone struggles to make money from it.
The nature of the beast is that the more batteries and motorcycles you deploy, the more you should earn. Scale is important as long as you don’t mess up on the operating side of things. To compound things further, what you deploy efficiently should likely get you free cash flow…to deploy more.
Most African startups have a handful of swapping stations limited to one geography – Nairobi is a popular choice. Spiro runs away with the scale again. At the start of the year, they had 600 swapping stations. They will close the year with nearly 2000. It is not just the scale but the scary rate of expansion that should worry the others.
Is the Product Still relevant?
Native African e-boda experts tell me that the Bodas, the motorcycle taxi riders in sub-Saharan Africa, are quite discerning about the product. They like to make a choice. That’s good news for any startup that has a product focus.
But I wonder, is that really the case?
When the motorcycle is the primary breadwinner, everything boils down to the TCO and accessibility. What would one likely choose – a ten swap station network or a 100 outlet support? Not to mention, solving for product when you have scale is easier than solving for scale when you have a product.
Sure, the reliability and the capabilities of the product are important, but the barrier of acceptance is modest. There is no need for cliches like Italian design, German engineering, Japanese technology, or Indian reliability. Once you have jumped over the modest capabilities barrier, it is the reach, the pricing power, and the support that decide everything.
Volume Gets You….More Volume
The nature of the two-wheeler business at the bottom end is that the more motorcycles you see in action, the more likely you are to buy that brand. It helps that you find the same brand’s swapping station everywhere.
Everything boils down to access to capital again.
Speed Matters When the Opportunity is Huge
We haven’t gone to the nuts and bolts yet. The African market is huge, and we have just started scratching the surface. There are potentially millions of Bodas waiting to be electrified. But the e-mobility supplier ecosystrem simply does not exist. Nearly everything of value comes from China, some from India. There is a huge potential to drive localisation of powertrains, packs, electronics, and cells within Africa. That would be the real growth driver and game-changer for a continent desperately seeking industrialisation.
The good thing is that Africa has the potential scale for it. What it does not have is consolidation. A back-of-the-paper-napkin calculation puts the African population of millions of boda bodas waiting to be electrified, translating into more than 1.5 million motorcycles per year kind of demand. With about 4 kWh in each motorcycle and a conservative battery set to motorcycle ratio of 1.5 for the swap stations, this puts the African battery demand at nine million kWh.
That is also known as 9.0 GWh, enough for someone to put cell manufacturing on the continent. Again, who can drive this from a vehicle OEM perspective would be someone with scale. And if a player with scale does that, it just makes the game even more biased in their favour. Cells are the highest cost input and a component where manufacturers end up paying the most margins.
Consolidation on the Horizon?
With the unfair situation today likely to cascade even further, the environment is likely to become even more challenging for smaller players. The African situation is unique. It is not an electric motorcycle market. It is a market that is seeking clean and cost-effective mobility solutions – electric motorcycles and battery swapping seem to be the best fit, for now. Energy arbitrage would continue to be the key driver, and scale would be critical. This is very different from a market like Vietnam or India, where electric mobility is still mostly about the product. That creates a much more equal and fairer arena.
In the African context, if one player has run away with the scale, we would not see an equilibrium return with better products. Likely, we would see the gap getting wider as the bigger player can optimise capital better, can roll out faster, can fix bugs, experiment, and steamroll the opposition. It gets even more challenging on the funding front – large funds would like to go with the market leader, by default. Smaller funds would shy away from smaller players as they realise the challenging landscape.
Which leaves the smaller actors with a tough choice. A consolidation is a natural progression, except in a battery swapping environment, it is not that simple. There is no interoperability. Creating one is as costly as funding any existing player.
The Indians Are Yet to Make a Move
Remember, the Indians are yet to make any move. Bajaj and TVS have a lot at stake in Africa. If the market electrifies without them, they lose control over a market with huge prospects, a market where they have spent the last two decades carving out a strong presence. They are yet to develop or deploy an electric motorcycle in Africa. They seem to be too engrossed in India, a market where electrification is as promising, if not more.
An underdog is Hero MotoCorp. India’s largest two-wheeler manufacturer has been a late bloomer in Africa, and electrification is an opportunity (or a challenge) for them. It is an opportunity to close the gap with Bajaj/TVS in Africa, but like the other two, Hero has nothing to deploy. Does mating with a small African actor provide an opportunity?
All three Indian players have huge cash reserves that can match the access to capital that Spiro has. What the Indians have not yet demonstrated is the intent.
A similar lack of intent also plagues everyone who is investing small cheques in the small players. I don’t see the opportunity [play out unless there is a rapid and massive build-out of scale.
Without that, I know who will win.
