Some companies start with a market gap. Moove started with two Nigerian kids in London who grew up watching their parents love a country they had to leave. Ladi Delano and Jide Odunsi met while studying in the city, Jide at the London School of Economics and Ladi at SOAS, and bonded over something most immigrant children recognize immediately, the strange mix of pride and frustration their parents carried about home. That curiosity about why a place so loved could also be so broken stayed with both of them long after graduation.

By the time they decided to go into business together, both men had already built up serious credentials elsewhere. Odunsi had worked as an investment banker at Goldman Sachs and a consultant at McKinsey, with degrees from LSE, MIT, and Oxford to match. Delano had already built and sold a Chinese alcoholic beverage company for more than 15 million dollars and co founded a billion dollar joint venture with Indonesia's Bakrie Group. Neither of them needed to start another company. They chose to anyway, because they wanted to build something that solved a problem their parents' generation never got to fix.

Before Moove, the pair built several other ventures together, including Express Pharmacy, now the fifth largest pharmacy chain in Lagos, built specifically to fight counterfeit drugs and stabilize prices for low income customers. But it was their fourth company, launched in 2020, that would define them. Moove was built around a simple but stubborn problem. Across Africa, there are far more people who want to drive for Uber or deliver packages than there are affordable, reliable vehicles for them to use. Cars are expensive to import, banks will not lend to gig workers with no credit history, and the people who most need a vehicle to earn a living are the ones least likely to get a loan for one.

Moove's answer was to flip the entire model. Instead of asking drivers to prove their creditworthiness on paper, Moove looks at how much revenue a driver actually generates on the road and finances a vehicle against that. It is called revenue based financing, and it meant a driver with no credit history but a solid earnings record could finally own a car. Uber became an early and important partner, helped along by the fact that Delano and Odunsi already knew Uber's team through one of their earlier ventures, an outdoor advertising company. But Moove still had to prove the model worked on Nigerian streets before anyone outside the country took it seriously.

It worked well enough that Moove has gone on to raise more than 260 million dollars and expand into nine markets across Sub Saharan Africa, the Middle East, and Asia. The company now finances drivers in ride hailing, logistics, and delivery, and has built a digital wallet offering debit cards, micro loans, and early access to income for the very drivers it finances.

What happened next is the part that turns this from a good African startup story into something bigger. Moove started working with Waymo, Google's self driving car unit, helping manage the charging, storage, and cleaning needed to keep a fleet of robotaxis running in cities like Phoenix and Miami. The company now describes itself as a kind of hyperscaler for the autonomous vehicle industry, the same revenue based financing model built for a Lagos driver now quietly keeping driverless taxis on the road in America. In January 2026, Moove acquired Kovi, a Brazilian fleet technology company, to extend that model into Latin America.

By mid 2025, Moove's annual recurring revenue had climbed to nearly 400 million dollars, up from 275 million the year before, and the company was reportedly chasing a 300 million dollar funding round that would value it at around 2 billion dollars.

What makes Delano and Odunsi's story worth telling is not just the size of what they built. It is the order things happened in. They did not set out to build infrastructure for Silicon Valley. They set out to solve a very specific, very local problem, a Lagos driver who could not get a car loan, and ended up building something the rest of the world needed too.