SafeBoda, the Ugandan-headquartered bike-hailing service is leaving Nigeria after about two years of operating in the country. SafeBoda launched in Ibadan, Nigeria in March 2020 with about 100 drivers and bright prospects. It chose Ibadan rather than Lagos to avoid the ban on commercial bike-hailing companies that adversely affected the operations of similar ride-hailing companies at that time.
Just over a year after launching in Nigeria with the appointment of Babajide Duroshola, former Community Manager, Technical Talent for Andela who resigned to join SafeBoda as its Country Head in Nigeria in May 2019, it boasted of some impressive statistics:
- Completed 1.5 Million trips across Ibadan
- Onboarded 5,000+ drivers
- Enhanced our embedded finance play with the launch of cashless payment, airtime and driver buy-now-pay-later offerings
- Built solid partnerships with companies like Imalipay, Paddycover, Allianz, and a host of others.
In March 2022, the company celebrated crossing 4 million rides, 50,000 deliveries with over 10,000 riders and 100,000 passengers.
According to the company, the business in Nigeria, “in its current state is not economically viable and unfortunately requires significant investment at this challenging time in the global economic landscape.”
Interestingly, the company launched SafeCar, its car-hailing service in Uganda and Nigeria in September 2022. Even though it is stopping its bike-hailing service, it says SafeCar will still continue as it has grown 40% weekly since its launch in early September.
This is the second country SafeBoda is leaving since it started operations. It exited Kenya in November 2020 due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
SafeBoda was founded in 2015 by director of operations Ricky Rapa Thomson and co-CEOs Maxime Dieudonne and Alastair Sussock. According to business intelligence platform Crunchbase, SafeBoda has raised up to $1.3-million in funding since launch.
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