Nigerian entrepreneur Ladi Delano sold Chinese vodka, then built a $2.1 billion mobility company

Moove announced on Wednesday that it had raised $250 million at a valuation of $2.1 billion, the largest single funding round any African-founded startup has secured this year. The Abu Dhabi sovereign wealth fund Mubadala led the round, with Toyota's growth fund Woven Capital and Ion Pacific co-leading.

Its co-founder announced a $1 billion Nigerian investment venture fourteen years ago that produced nothing anyone can point to.

Ladi Delano has now built three businesses in three continents and three industries. The first made him rich. The second was announced repeatedly and never materialised. The third is his largest by a wide margin.

Vodka

Delano was born in March 1982 to Nigerian parents and raised in England, where he has said he had mild dyslexia and deafness in one ear. The learning difficulties interrupted his education and he left college without finishing.

He took an internship at Merrill Lynch in the United States, then moved to London. He and a group of friends decided to enter the drinks business during what was then a boom in premium vodka in the city.

The costs defeated them in London, so he moved the operation to China. Solidarnosc Asia was founded in 2004, when Delano was 22, and produced a premium vodka called Solid XS.

It worked. The brand reached roughly $20 million in annual revenue, distributed across some thirty Chinese cities, and accounts of its market share range from 50% to 70% of the premium segment. He sold the company to a rival for more than $15 million.

He put the proceeds into Chinese property through a holding company called the Delano Reid Group.

A billion dollars that never arrived

Delano returned to Nigeria in April 2012, and what followed was among the most publicised investment announcements in the country that decade.

He assembled a consortium and brought in the Bakrie Group, one of Indonesia's largest conglomerates, to form Bakrie Delano Africa. The venture was announced as a $1 billion joint investment vehicle, with Delano as co-founder and chief executive, targeting mining, agriculture, oil and gas across Nigeria.

Contemporary accounts described the Indonesian side as having committed more than $900 million. Forbes named Delano among the youngest millionaires to watch in Africa that year, when he was 30. Forbes Africa ran an extended feature on him in September 2013. Nigerian outlets began describing him as the country's youngest billionaire.

The venture never produced a reported asset, transaction or operating business. No acquisition was announced. No mine, farm or field entered production under its name. It appears in his biography as a title and a headline figure, and then simply stops appearing.

The Bakrie Group had its own difficulties in the same period. Its coal business, Bumi Resources, went through a debt restructuring, and its London-listed vehicle Bumi plc collapsed into a public dispute with the financier Nat Rothschild. Whether that affected the Nigerian venture has never been reported, and neither party has explained what happened to it.

What is documented is the gap. The $1 billion figure was announced in 2012. Delano's next company was incorporated seven years later.

Moove

He founded it with Jide Odunsi, who had worked as an investment banker at Goldman Sachs and a management consultant at McKinsey. Both men are based in the United Kingdom, with academic backgrounds spanning the London School of Economics, Oxford and MIT. Sources date the founding to 2019 or 2020, when Delano was 37.

The original problem was narrow and African. Ride-hailing drivers in Lagos could not obtain vehicle finance, because banks would not lend against gig income and used imports were expensive and unreliable. Nigeria's own policies restricting car imports to encourage local manufacturing had tightened supply further.

Moove financed vehicles against a driver's future earnings rather than against a credit history, taking repayment as a share of weekly revenue. It partnered with Uber the following year to offer the product to drivers across sub-Saharan Africa.

The model travelled. Moove entered Europe in 2022 with an all-electric rent-to-buy operation in London, expanded into India, and acquired the Brazilian car rental company Kovi. By early 2025 it operated in nine markets and had raised roughly $190 million.

Uber led a $100 million round in 2024 that valued the company at $750 million.

What the company is now

The business Mubadala has just funded is not the one that started in Lagos.

Moove now finances, owns and operates fleets for autonomous vehicle companies. It manages fleet operations, facilities and charging infrastructure for Waymo, Alphabet's robotaxi unit, having begun with the Phoenix fleet and extended to Miami.

The proposition is that self-driving software removes the driver but not the work. Every autonomous vehicle still requires charging, cleaning, sensor calibration, repair, storage and dispatch support. Moove is building that layer rather than developing driving software, and has coined the term Nests for the robotics-first depots where the vehicles are serviced and dispatched.

"Every major technology revolution becomes an infrastructure race," Delano said. "The internet required data centres. AI required compute. Autonomy requires fleets, charging, maintenance, data systems and 24/7 operations in every city."

He has framed the position as deliberately neutral, operating across rival platforms rather than tying the company to one. That has become more valuable as the sector has fractured, with Waymo and Uber recently separating in Phoenix.

Moove expects to grow its autonomous vehicle workforce from around 150 to roughly 500 by the end of this year. The new money funds fleet ownership and Nest construction across the United States, Europe and Asia.

Who is behind it

The register is unusually heavy for an African-founded company.

Mubadala first backed Moove in 2023, arranging a $76 million package that combined $28 million of equity, $10 million of venture debt from BlackRock-managed funds and $38 million that had not previously been disclosed. BlueCrest Capital Management, Sona Capital and the Raptor Group joined this round.

Existing investors deepening their positions include BlackRock, MUFG, Franklin Templeton, Uber, Left Lane, Silverbacks Holdings, Endeavor Catalyst, Square Associates, The Latest Ventures and the Ontario Power Generation Pension Plan.

Ali Eid Al Mheiri, executive director of diversified assets at Mubadala's UAE investments platform, said the investment fits a strategy of backing scalable technology platforms.

The valuation is 2.8 times what the company was worth eighteen months ago.

What the shift costs

The move into autonomous infrastructure changes what Moove is exposed to, and the change runs in an uncomfortable direction.

The original model was self-liquidating. A driver's income repaid the vehicle, and the company's capital turned over as the loans amortised. Autonomous fleets require large upfront spending and take longer to recover it. A Nest has to run enough vehicles across enough trips to cover rent, equipment, power and labour before it earns anything.

The company is also now dependent on partners it does not control. Not developing driving software keeps research costs down and leaves Moove reliant on Waymo, Uber and whoever else deploys fleets. And expansion across three continents exposes it to different safety, insurance and transport regimes in each market.

Delano has relocated the centre of gravity accordingly. Moove is now headquartered in Dubai and describes the United Arab Emirates as its anchor. "From our anchor in the UAE, and backed by long-term strategic capital, Moove now has the platform to help take autonomy from breakthrough technology to every day transportation," he said.

The company that began by financing Lagos taxi drivers is now a UAE-domiciled fleet operator for American robotaxis.

Three companies

Delano is co-founder and co-chief executive alongside Odunsi, and separately holds the chairmanship.

The pattern across his career is that he identifies infrastructure gaps rather than products. Solid XS filled a distribution gap in a Chinese market that wanted premium spirits and lacked local supply. Moove fills a financing gap that banks would not touch, and now a servicing gap that software companies do not want to own.

Bakrie Delano Africa was meant to fill the largest gap of all, which was foreign capital willing to commit to Nigerian resources at scale. It was announced, publicised, and never built.

Neither Delano nor the Bakrie Group has ever explained why.