Moove Series C funding backs the robotaxi infrastructure race

Moove Series C funding has landed one of the year's most striking mobility bets, with the UAE-headquartered company raising 250 million dollars at a 2.1 billion dollar valuation in a round led by Abu Dhabi's Mubadala Investment Company. The round was co-led by Woven Capital, Toyota's growth fund, and Ion Pacific, with a deep bench of backers including BlackRock, MUFG, Franklin Templeton, Uber and BlueCrest. The raise brings Moove's total funding to roughly 694 million dollars, but the more interesting story is the pivot the money funds, because Moove is repositioning itself from a vehicle-financing fintech into the infrastructure layer for autonomous vehicles. That pivot is the heart of why this matters. Founded in Nigeria in 2019 by Ladi Delano and Jide Odunsi, Moove built its business financing cars for gig-economy drivers, becoming Uber's biggest global fleet partner along the way. It now operates around 42,000 vehicles across 29 cities in 13 countries, employs 3,300 people, and generates about 420 million dollars in annual recurring revenue. But its next chapter is aimed squarely at the robotaxi era. Moove already manages autonomous vehicle fleets through a partnership with Waymo in Phoenix and Miami, with London to follow, and the fresh capital will build out what it calls Nests, robotics-first depots where self-driving fleets are charged, serviced, maintained and orchestrated around the clock. Delano frames the thesis simply, that every technology revolution becomes an infrastructure race, the internet needed data centers, AI needed compute, and autonomy needs fleets, charging, maintenance and 24/7 operations in every city. The logic is a classic picks-and-shovels bet. Rather than trying to build the self-driving technology itself, a fiercely competitive field dominated by Waymo, Tesla and a crowd of Chinese firms, Moove is positioning to own the unglamorous but essential operational layer that every autonomous fleet will need regardless of whose software wins. If robotaxis scale as their backers expect, someone has to physically house, power and maintain millions of vehicles, and Moove is betting that infrastructure ownership, not the algorithms, will define the category leaders. The plan is to grow its autonomous mobility workforce from around 150 to 500 by year-end, a signal of how central this shift is to the company. For the UAE, the appeal is clear. Mubadala's backing anchors a globally ambitious mobility company in Abu Dhabi and Dubai, and the emirates have made autonomous transport a visible pillar of their smart-city plans, with Dubai targeting a quarter of all journeys being autonomous by 2030. Mubadala framed the investment as confidence in the infrastructure supporting autonomous transport as it moves beyond pilots, aligning with the UAE's push to diversify its economy and position itself as a hub for advanced technology. Moove's own framing, taking autonomy from breakthrough technology to scaled deployment from its UAE anchor, fits that agenda neatly. The honest caveats are real. Autonomous mobility at scale remains largely unproven commercially, the timelines for mass robotaxi deployment keep slipping, and Moove is investing heavily in infrastructure for a market that has not fully arrived. Its rapid expansion through acquisitions like Kovi in Brazil and Tokyo Taxi in Japan adds integration risk, and a 2.1 billion dollar valuation prices in a future that still has to materialize. But the bet is shrewd and well-timed. This Moove Series C funding buys not just growth capital but a foothold in the operational backbone of a mobility future that, if it arrives, will need exactly the infrastructure Moove is racing to build.