One week after raising $215 million, one of the largest disclosed investments in Africa’s electric mobility sector, Spiro, a Nairobi-based e-mobility startup, has named a new chief executive with experience building the kind of infrastructure it hopes to scale across the continent.
What happened? On Tuesday, the electric motorcycle and battery-swapping company appointed Anant Badjatya as Group Chief Executive Officer (CEO). He joins from Indofast Energy, a joint venture between IndianOil and SUN Mobility, where he oversaw a network of over 1,800 battery-swapping stations serving about 90,000 vehicles daily across India. Kaushik Burman, the former CEO, will now lead Spiro’s mobility services business, which handles EV deployment, rider leasing, battery subscriptions, and fleet operations.Â
State of play: The hire is notable because battery-swapping, not the motorcycles themselves, is becoming the battleground for Africa’s electric mobility startups. Spiro said it has deployed over 100,000 electric motorcycles and built over 2,500 swapping stations across seven African markets. Scaling that network further will require expertise in energy infrastructure, logistics, and operations as much as vehicle sales.
The timing is no coincidence. Fresh off its $215 million raise, Spiro, which acquired UK e-bike manufacturer Coexlion in May, is entering a phase where it is trying to do two things: build e-bikes tailored for African roads and tightly control its supply chain there, and expand its distribution network for swapping proprietary battery products, giving it last-mile reach and removing adoption constraints.Â
Building electric mobility businesses in Africa means solving a distribution problem, an infrastructure problem, and a financing problem all at once. Badjatya has done part of that before, albeit in a different market. India is one of the world’s most mature battery-swapping ecosystems. Africa is not.
Market leader Battery Smart operates more than 1,600 battery-swapping stations in India alone, with over 90,000 riders completing more than 100 million battery swaps. SUN Mobility operates over 620 stations. By comparison, while Spiro says it has more than 2,500 battery-swapping stations across Africa, riders have completed only 30 million swaps to date.Â
Zoom out: With Badjatya’s experience, the challenge now is whether lessons from a market with thousands of charging and fuel distribution points can be adapted to one where the infrastructure still has to be built from the ground up.