GoCab operates a drive-to-own business model creating jobs and financing gig workers in emerging markets, working in partnership with ride-hailing and food-delivery companies. It also offers cars finance, BNPL for mobile phones, motorbike financing for delivery couriers and other add-on services in one digital app with its own proprietary tech.
It has been started by two investment bankers, Azamat Sultan and Hendrick Ketchemen in summer of 2024 and now has a team of over 100 people across 5 countries representing 18 nationalities. Before starting GoCab Azamat and Hendrick have worked together in asset management for 6 years. They started this business solving for credit gap for gig workers and looking for a business model with impact in mind. Since its launch, the business experienced explosive growth and now generates over 17 million USD annual recurring revenue after only first 18 months of operations.
GoCab has successfully raised its first equity investment round, raising a total of 15 million USD equity and 30 million USD debt in a sizable Seed round led by the leading Venture capital firms in Africa E3 Capital and Janngo VC, KawiSafi and Cur8 Capital.
GoCab is also currently working on a 60 million USD Shariah-compliant debt facility which will be syndicated by the EM specialist private debt funds in the industry, out of that amount so far it secured over 30 million USD in debt commitments from Cur8, Cumberland and Verdant and in discussions with another lender for the remaining 30 million USD allocation.
This round will help GoCab team to scale to the new markets and get to the next milestone of 10 000 cars and 100 million USD Annual Recurring Revenue in 24 months from now.
GoCab operates a similar business model to Moove, one of the mobility fintech pioneers from Africa, started in Nigeria in 2019, which is working mainly with Uber and recently announced that it is raising next round at 2bln USD valuation.
GoCab is built on ethical principals of its founders and management team, it operates on sharia principals, its team actively participates in charity work and launched a separate waqf fund supporting children from underprivileged backgrounds by committing 1% of its net annual profits towards giving back to the societies where it operates.
GoCab co-founder and Chairman, Azamat Sultan is a London Business School graduate and former UK asset manager, originally from Tajikistan, commented on this news: “For Gocab team it is a fantastic first founding stone towards building a unicorn in the emerging markets private credit space within next 24 months”
GoCab co-founder and Board Member, Hendrick Ketchemen, who is a top executive investment banker who has built a very successful career in France and originally comes from Cameroon, commented on the above: “GoCab for me and Azamat is about the real impact of the capital on lives of our customers, working in finance we saw numbers on the screens, now we can see smiles on the faces and this energizes us to work more and more to bring positive change”.
