SafeBoda, a community of motorcycle taxi (boda-boda) drivers, is finally scaling out of Uganda. The ride-hailing startup, founded in 2015, is expanding to the Kenyan market.
This was revealed by Nicholas Kamanzi, from Africa's Talking, who briefly spoke about it at Swarm Summit last week. (See also: Communicate in a language that government officials and policymakers understand, Minister Frank Tumwebaze Tells Innovators).
In a quick conversation with Maxime Dieudonne, SafeBoda's co-founder and co-CEO, at Swarm, he declined to give a full interview about the expansion. However, he confirmed that it is true.
In a further WhatsApp conversation, Maxime requested that we contact him towards the end of January 2018, as it is when he will be in a position to answer most of our questions.
"We can't provide much comments at this stage but if you contact me at the end of January I will be in a position to respond to your questions in details," Maxime wrote.
SafeBoda co-founder and co-CEO Alastair Sussock was at iHub in Kenya mid-October this year to tell the Kenyan community more about SafeBoda as well as the regional expansion plans.
With two CEOs, our guess is that one of them shall have to relocate to Kenya - though Maxime declined to comment on the questions regarding this. We also think that SafeBoda will most likely shift most of the operations to Kenya.
This is partly due to the fact that when Nicholas Kamanzi was commenting about his conversation with Alastair, it was in the light of the cheaper internet in Kenya.
And, given that SafeBoda is an internet company, it'd make sense to have most of the operations in a country that has a more favourable environment for an internet company.
Mid this year, SafeBoda participated in the Spring Accelerator and raised a non-equity undisclosed amount of funding. This amount is probably what they're using for their expansion plans. (See also: SafeBoda, BareFoot Power Accepted in Spring Accelerator’s Third Cohort)
This comes as good news for other Ugandan startups that'll be looking to expand regionally and across the continent.
According to the blurb from iHub, about the startup, SafeBoda "has +1,000 drivers in Kampala and since launching the app has seen over 40% monthly growth since launch."
With all this activity in the year 2017, SafeBoda came in at number 4 in the Startup Digest Africa Founders Top 10 ranking for the year 2017. A ranking which was topped by two women-led startups.