Moove announced a $250 million funding round on August 5, 2026, valuing the company at $2.1 billion. The money will go toward expanding the company's business of managing fleets of self-driving taxis (TechCrunch, Bloomberg, The Robot Report). Mubadala Investment Company led the round, with Woven Capital and Ion Pacific serving as co-leads. A wide range of investors participated, including BlueCrest Capital Management, Sona Asset Management, The Raptor Group, BlackRock, MUFG, Franklin Templeton, Uber, Left Lane, Silverbacks Holdings, Square Associates, The Latest Ventures, Endeavor Catalyst, and the Ontario Power Generation Pension Plan (TechCrunch).

Founded in 2020 in Nigeria and now headquartered in Dubai, Moove operates 42,000 vehicles across 14 countries and employs 3,300 people globally. The company started by helping gig economy drivers get cars when they couldn't get traditional car loans. Moove calls itself "the world's first mobility fintech" on its website (moove.io), and its headline for this funding round reads "to build what autonomy runs on." Ladi Delano co-founded the company and serves as co-CEO (TechCrunch).

Moove began moving into self-driving vehicle operations in early 2023. The company currently manages the fleet for Waymo — the self-driving car company owned by Alphabet, Google's parent company — in Phoenix, Miami, and Las Vegas, with London planned as a future expansion market. Moove does not yet own the Waymo vehicles it operates but plans to use borrowed money to buy Waymo self-driving taxis going forward. Separately, the company already owns self-driving taxi vehicles from another developer that has not been publicly named (TechCrunch).

A key part of the new funding will go toward building automated facilities called "Nests." These are depots that use robots to handle vehicle charging, maintenance, and servicing automatically, so human workers don't have to do it by hand. Moove currently has roughly 15 of these depots in some stage of development. The company also plans to hire about 350 more employees to support the self-driving fleet business (TechCrunch).

Moove's original business of financing cars for ride-hailing drivers is on track to become fully profitable in 2026. That means the company can use its own earnings to help fund its self-driving ambitions rather than relying entirely on money from investors (TechCrunch).

The broader context here is that building self-driving cars gets most of the attention, but someone also has to handle the less glamorous work: financing the vehicles, cleaning them, charging them, fixing them, and sending them out to pick up passengers. Companies like Waymo build the self-driving technology, but they don't necessarily want to run all of that physical operations work themselves. The big ride-hailing companies like Uber and Lyft built their businesses on a different model: they connected riders and drivers through an app without owning any cars. Moove is betting that the self-driving era changes that logic, and that owning and maintaining fleets of vehicles becomes the most important part of the business.

The group of investors backing Moove gives some credibility to that idea. When Uber, BlackRock, Franklin Templeton, and a sovereign wealth fund like Mubadala all put money into a company focused on fleet operations, it suggests that major players across the financial and ride-hailing worlds see lasting value in the physical side of running self-driving taxis. Woven Capital, which is Toyota's investment fund, co-leading the round also makes sense: if self-driving cars are going to scale up, someone needs to build the infrastructure to keep them running.

The Nests concept is the part of this story worth watching most closely. These automated depots are expensive to build, and the big question is whether enough self-driving taxi revenue will come in to cover that cost. If the math works, the depots could make the whole operation profitable at scale. If it doesn't, they could become a financial burden. Fifteen depots in development is still early, and Moove has not disclosed how much each one costs or how many vehicles they can service, so the financial picture remains unclear.

The difference between managing Waymo's vehicles and actually owning them also matters. Right now, Moove runs Waymo's cars under a contract but doesn't hold them as assets on its books. The plan to buy Waymo robotaxis using borrowed money would change that, making Moove's business more expensive to run but also giving it more control over how and where the vehicles are deployed. The fact that Moove already owns vehicles from an unnamed self-driving company shows it isn't betting everything on Waymo alone, which is a sensible hedge given that timelines for self-driving companies remain unpredictable.

Moove's journey from a Nigerian startup financing cars for gig drivers to a multi-continent operator of self-driving vehicle fleets would have been hard to predict in 2020. The company isn't building self-driving technology itself. It is building the financial and physical infrastructure that self-driving cars need to operate as a real business. Whether Moove's tagline of becoming "the backbone of the robotaxi industry" proves accurate will depend on how well it executes over the next 18 to 24 months, especially on whether those automated depots can make the numbers work for large-scale self-driving taxi service.