It’s Tuesday, and today we’re diving into ARC Ride, a Kenyan e-mobility startup. Founded in 2019 by Joseph Hurst-Croft, the company recently raised $5 million from the International Finance Corporation in its pre-Series A round.

I write a lot about African mobility. This year alone I wrote about Ghana’s and Angola’s transportation plays.

However, no African country illustrates how the mobility sector is organized, how it develops, and the issues it experiences better than Kenya. Specifically, motorbikes, and even more specifically, boda bodas — an East African term for local motorbike taxis, originating from “border to border.”

Now, nobody really knows how many boda bodas there are in Kenya. Some estimates put the number at one million, others at two, and some as high as three million (including rickshaws). Regardless of the exact figure, the sector indirectly supports roughly double the number of riders, making motorbike taxis one of the largest employment sectors in the country.

The reasons behind this dominance is fairly straightforward. Because of the challenges in traditional public transportation, there is a strong need for either personal transport or some form of taxi service. That creates demand for boda bodas. And since one can buy a relatively cheap bike, take out a loan, or even rent one, supply follows quickly. The result is at least a million drivers on the road today.

Most of these riders operate ICE-powered bikes, but that is beginning to change.

The motorbike market peaked in 2021, when over 285,000 motorcycles were registered that year. What followed was a steep decline to under 70,000 registrations in 2024. There were several reasons for the drop: rising vehicle taxes, high inflation, and a general easing of demand after the run-up in previous years.

However, another factor is fuel prices. Fuel prices have been steadily increasing, and today they are roughly twice as high as a decade ago. Daily boda boda drivers spend about $6 on fuel. When you’re making roughly $19 a day, a 20-30% increase in fuel prices can lead to one of two outcomes: either costs rise and margins shrink, or ride prices increase, which reduces demand. My assumption is that both dynamics played a role in the fall in motorcycle sales.

What makes Kenya somewhat unusual in this context is the structure of its energy system. Petroleum remains the largest import category, but at the same time the country produces roughly 90% of its electricity from renewable resources, mainly hydropower and geothermal.

That combination opens the door to electrifying the mobility sector.

Absolute sales of electric two-wheelers (E2W) remain small, with fewer than 5,000 registrations in 2024, but their share is rising quickly, from 0.05% in 2021 to 7.1% in 2024. There are still constraints on E2W adoption, and I’ll touch on some of them in a moment, but electricity availability is not one of them. Kenya’s power utility estimates that the grid already has enough spare capacity to power roughly 2 million electric motorcycles.

The government is also pushing electrification in the mobility sector:

But there are challenges to adoption.

First, electric options can cost roughly twice as much as an ICE-powered alternative. If a rider makes around $200 per month, spending more than $2,000 on an electric motorbike is a difficult proposition.

Another barrier is charging and swapping infrastructure. Riders complain about the limited number of swapping and charging stations, especially outside central Nairobi and in neighboring cities. No rider wants to risk getting stranded without a charge. And because charging a battery can take a long time, even if you find a place to charge it, you may be waiting for hours.

Finally, there is the issue of maintenance. While E2Ws have fewer moving components than ICE bikes, they still require servicing. If something breaks, someone has to repair it, and Kenya currently doesn’t have enough trained technicians.

ARC Ride is trying to address these challenges.

Similarly to Kofa, ARC Ride is building an integrated system for electric two-wheelers.

The business is designed around a battery swap network. There are over 250 of these stations. They operate 24/7 and allow motorbike owners to swap batteries in a matter of minutes. The company reported that at the 100 station mark, a driver in Nairobi could find one roughly every 3 km. That would imply that today the density is closer to about 1.2 km.

Each swap cabinet includes 12 battery lockers and is powered by solar energy. Every locker contains a 1.44 kWh LFP battery. The stations are fully automated and IoT-connected, allowing ARC Ride to monitor and manage the network remotely.

These swapping stations and the batteries inside them power ARC Ride’s electric two-wheelers, which are locally assembled and engineered to suit local road conditions. The company currently offers two models.

One is the Bidii Boda, which starts at around $1,300, roughly in line with the most popular ICE-powered bikes. The Bidii Boda has a 5.1 kW motor, a top speed of 90 km/h, and a range of about 85 km. It also includes a few additional features, such as an onboard speaker and a charging port.

The Corbett is a more affordable scooter-style option. It has a 1.2 kW motor, a top speed of 60 km/h, and a range of 60 km.

Boda boda riders do have to stop for swaps relatively frequently. A ride-hailing rider can average 150-200 km per day, meaning that depending on the model and daily distance traveled, there could be between one and four swaps per day. Still, the company claims riders can save about 30% on operating costs by switching to ARC Ride.

To operate within ARC Ride’s ecosystem, customers use the company’s mobile app.

And then there’s a control layer behind the product. The company’s privacy policy states that it collects data from mobile apps, vehicles, smart batteries, battery chargers, and battery swapping cabinets. That data can then be used to optimize battery distribution, station placement, and overall operating efficiency.

A battery-as-a-service (BaaS) model, as one report appropriately put it, delinks battery and bike ownership.

For customers, this reduces the upfront price of the motorcycle, allowing more riders to afford an electric vehicle.

For ARC Ride, it creates lock-in. It’s somewhat like buying a car but only being able to purchase fuel at Shell petrol stations. I would also assume that the secondary market for such bikes will not be as robust, because there are real geographic constraints on where the vehicle can be used, and most buyers would likely prefer to purchase a fully independent vehicle. If that assumption is correct, customer lifetimes increase.

But to convince customers to buy the motorcycle in the first place, ARC Ride needs to ensure that riders can use the vehicle almost as seamlessly as a traditional ICE bike. That requires the company to establish three things:

Another component of the business model worth mentioning has to do with tracking and fleet operators. Because the company can monitor vehicles remotely, ARC Ride can geofence bikes to specific areas and disable them remotely. This is attractive to financing providers, but also to fleet operators. They can effectively act as financing partners themselves, while also gaining much better visibility into rider performance and fleet efficiency.

RC Ride generates revenue from two primary sources: motorcycle sales and battery swaps.

With the recent investment and a debt facility secured in 2025, the company is now scaling toward 600 battery swap cabinets and 25,000 batteries. The business currently operates in Kenya, with plans to expand into Rwanda, Tanzania, and Uganda.

I would start by reiterating a point I made in the Kofa article:

Additionally, unlike many other African markets, Kenya already has several competitors operating in the space, including Spiro, Ampersand, and Roam. That puts additional pressure on ARC Ride’s finances. Customer acquisition becomes more expensive, competition for physical locations increases, etc. In other words, you have to believe the company can out-execute more established competitors without running out of capital in the process.

Another issue is the slowdown in motorcycle sales overall. Whether the market rebounds or whether the recent decline represents a new baseline remains to be seen. But it is obviously much easier to build a business in a market with an annual TAM of ~300,000 motorcycles than in one closer to 100,000.

The company is rapidly building out the infrastructure. If it can keep adding riders, batteries, and swap stations within dense urban corridors, the economics should improve materially because each battery and each cabinet gets used more often, while recurring swap revenue becomes more valuable than one-off vehicle sales.

ARC Ride is also open to working with OEMs and has been in talks with major players in the market. If it manages to partner with those OEMs and leverage their distribution channels to push its own vehicles (and, by extension, its swapping network), customer acquisition becomes significantly easier.

What also works in ARC Ride’s favor is that Kenya’s EV ecosystem appears to be developing relatively quickly compared to many other African markets. We can have a situation here where the rising tide lifts all boats. If ARC Ride manages to survive the difficult early years of infrastructure buildout, it could benefit disproportionately as the market matures.

What’s the one lesson investors and founders can take away from ARC Ride?

When you are in a competitive market, you need ways to somehow catch up with the market leaders. Oftentimes the best way to do that is through partnerships.