Africa’s electric mobility story has often been one of promise over progress. Infrastructure is scarce, power grids are unreliable, and most markets still run on cheap imported motorcycles. But Dubai-headquartered Spiro has spent the past two years trying to rewrite that narrative.
The company just announced a $100 million investment round led by The Fund for Export Development in Africa (FEDA), the development arm of Afreximbank. The raise marks Africa’s largest-ever EV mobility investment and cements Spiro as the continent’s most aggressive electric motorbike company.
Spiro says it plans to deploy more than 100,000 electric bikes across Africa by the end of 2025, a 400% year-over-year jump that underscores its ambition to dominate a category long considered too fragmented to scale.
Spiro’s growth has been dizzying. When CEO Kaushik Burman joined two years ago from Taiwanese battery-swapping giant Gogoro, the startup had just 8,000 electric bikes and 150 swap stations spread between neighboring countries Benin and Togo.
Today, it operates in six countries—including Rwanda, Kenya, Nigeria, and Uganda—with over 60,000 bikes deployed and 1,500 swap stations, where riders can swap depleted batteries for freshly charged ones. Battery swaps have surged from 4 million in 2022 to over 27 million this year, Burman told TechCrunch.
The secret behind that growth, Burman says, is a business model built for Africa’s realities.
In African cities, motorcycle taxis—known as boda bodas in Kenya or okadas in Nigeria—move people and goods through congested cities and rural towns alike. Yet for the millions of riders who rely on them, fuel costs are punishing.
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