It’s salary week. 
Francophone Africa has one of tech’s biggest success stories in Instadeep, the Tunisian AI startup acquired by BioNTech for nearly $700 million in 2023. But two years on, a question lingers: can the region produce another AI breakout? We’ll explore this in tomorrow’s The Next Wave: Francophone Africa newsletter.
Read past editions and subscribe to get future ones straight to your inbox here.
Let’s get into today’s dispatch.
Fundraiser
Moove is making money moves
Moove is back in the headlines, but this time, it’s not about its drivers protesting.
So, what’s happening? Moove, an African mobility financing startup, is chasing a $300 million equity funding round at a valuation above $2 billion. The Uber-backed fintech has built a business around financing vehicles for drivers who lack access to traditional credit. This new funding round would cement Moove’s place among Africa’s most valuable startups.
Moove 
Money moves. In January, Moove acquired Brazilian urban mobility provider Kovi for an undisclosed amount, months after entering a partnership with US commercial ride-hailing service Waymo. In 2024, the startup reported $50 million in revenue at a $750 million valuation. By September 2025, it had scaled to nearly $400 million in annualised recurring revenue and claims to have achieved profitability. In July, it was in talks to raise over $1 billion in debt funding to expand into autonomous driving through a partnership with Alphabet’s Waymo and fuel its rollout in the US. Beyond North America, Moove operates in four other continents, including South America, Africa, Europe, and Asia.
The chink in Moove’s armour. In Lagos, UberGo drivers using Moove-financed Suzuki S-presso cars recently staged protests after their weekly remittance doubled from ₦56,400 ($38) to ₦112,200 ($75). Drivers accuse Moove of imposing unfair costs, while Moove blames inflation and rising costs.
When you put the pieces together, you see a startup winning global investor confidence while struggling to balance unit economics and driver welfare at home. This equation will define Moove’s next chapter in the mobility sector. How will Moove’s unicorn ambition fare?
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Mobility
Lagride expands with 100 EVs
Lagride, the e-hailing platform backed by Lagos State, has introduced 100 new electric vehicles (EVs) into its fleet. The rollout is part of a larger plan to deploy 3,000 EVs within three years, backed by flexible asset financing models that allow drivers to lease and eventually own the vehicles.
These new EVs boast a 333-kilometre range that can cover a Lagos to Ibadan round trip on a single charge.
The rollout puts Lagride in the small but growing circle of operators, such as MaxNg, experimenting with EVs in Nigeria. In April, Bolt introduced electric tricycles in Lagos, partnering with SGX Mobility. FoltĂŻ Technologies Limited, an EV transport company, also rolled out EVs in April, through its ride-hailing service, eDryv.
Context matters here. In March, Chinese automobile firm CIG Motors took over Lagride’s operations and has been vocal about shifting to more sustainable driver arrangements, with EVs as the long-term bet.
Yet Nigeria’s road to electrification isn’t smooth. Charging points are still limited, and batteries remain expensive. Most drivers are leaning toward compressed natural gas (CNG) conversions to survive the recurring fuel crises. Lagos’ EV experiment may not flip the market overnight, but it shows that Nigeria’s EV journey is underway, one cautious rollout at a time.
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connectivity
Africa’s 45,000km undersea cable set to go live this month
A massive underwater internet cable backed by Meta is expected to begin operations across Africa this September. The 2Africa cable stretches 45,000km around the continent, promising to lower internet costs and make connections more reliable.
Why does this matter? Internet access in Africa is expensive and often unreliable. In 2024, fewer than 4 in 10 Africans were online. This new cable could change that completely. Cheaper, more reliable connections could unlock growth across the continent’s digital economy, making it easier for people to get online, and for tech companies to build services without crippling bandwidth costs.
State of play: The 2Africa cable is being laid out by a consortium that includes big players like Meta, MTN, Orange, China Mobile International, Telecom Egypt, and Vodafone. The undersea cable connects London to South Africa, with more stops in Ghana and Nigeria.
Meta isn’t just doing this out of kindness and generosity. With the population growth rate on the continent, the next billion consumers on the internet could come from here. Good and reliable internet infrastructure is needed to take advantage of that growing market. And with the rising demand for data-heavy tools like AI, Meta is betting that better connectivity will fuel both adoption and future profits.
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Ai
Nigerian government releases a national LLM for local languages
Nigeria’s Minister of Communications, Innovation, and Digital Economy, Dr. Bosun Tijani, is making moves to match his recent TIME100 AI recognition. Over the weekend at the UN General Assembly in New York, he unveiled N-ATLAS, an AI model that can speak, understand, and write Yoruba, Hausa, Igbo, and Nigerian English.
The model is designed as a foundation model for a broad range of applications: helping call centers understand Nigerian accents, developing digital services for government offices in different languages, and improving local research in the AI space.
Why does it matter? Global AI tools like ChatGPT and Gemini still struggle when it comes to African languages and contexts, mostly due to scarce training data.
Rather than wait for Google or OpenAI to catch up, Nigeria built its own. To develop N-ATLAS, the government partnered with Awarri, a local tech company, to gather voice and text data across all six geopolitical zones. The project could play a big role in preserving local languages and culture as AI adoption accelerates.
Zoom out: N-ATLAS could be an important foundation for powering inclusive AI solutions tailored to Nigeria’s unique contexts, but more support is needed to make sure it can move from just a foundation to a practical tool. Nigerian developers and researchers are still unable to make significant progress in the AI space because of limited access to the compute infrastructure needed to build AI solutions. For Nigeria to truly lead in inclusive AI, government investment will need to go beyond announcements and into making infrastructure widely accessible.
SPECIAL NUMBER
$202 million.
This is how much the Nigerian government hopes to make from the Electronic Money Transfer Levy (EMTL) by 2027. The EMTL is a ₦50 ($0.03) charge on electronic transfers exceeding ₦10,000 ($7). By 2027, every ₦50 ($0.03) you pay could add up to ₦303 billion ($202 million) in annual government revenue.
Learn more about the Nigerian government and its many money-making schemes in this week’s Follow The Money column. Every Monday, TechCabal unpacks the earnings, business models, and growth strategies shaping the future of Africa’s tech ecosystem.
CRYPTO TRACKER
The World Wide Web3
Source:
|
Coin Name |
Current Value |
Day |
Month |
|---|---|---|---|
 Bitcoin |
$114.515 |
– 1.04% |
– 1.99% |
| Ether |
$4,336 |
– 3.40% |
– 9.28% |
| XRP |
$2.91 |
– 2.55% |
– 4.22% |
| Solana |
$232.35 |
– 3.45% |
+ 16.90% |
* Data as of 02.00 AM WAT, September 22, 2025.
Events
- Entertainment Week Africa (EWA)—formerly Entertainment Week Lagos—returns to Lagos on November 18–23, 2025. Now a pan-African platform for the $58.4 billion creative economy, EWA has drawn 53,000+ attendees across film, music, fashion, and tech. This year’s edition introduces a dedicated film and music content market where artists, labels, directors, and publishers can pitch, licence, and sell directly to buyers and investors, supported by hands-on clinics to prep them for meetings. It will also feature a 50-company job fair, an expanded deal room accelerator with a ₦25 million seed fund, and more film premieres under the theme “Close the Gap.” Learn more here.
- The 10th FATE Business Conference takes place on September 26 in Lagos under the theme “AI-Powered Business: Innovate. Automate. Accelerate.” The conference will feature keynotes from Kofo Akinkugbe (SecureID) and Adedeji Olowe (Lendsqr), with panel discussions led by policymakers and business leaders including Olatunbosun Alake (Lagos State Government), Prof. Peter Adewale Obadare (Digital Encode), and Bode Abifarin (Strata). Expect practical insights on how AI is changing industries and powering business growth. Register here.
Written by: Opeyemi Kareem and Ifeoluwa Aigbiniode
Edited by: Ganiu Oloruntade
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I am the CEO of 9JAGISTLAND.My name is Adedeji Timothy and my co-owner is Oyekola Damilare.This blog is born out of our passion to educating to people in all aspect of internet life.We are enthusiastic about writing posts and articles online.
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