Ingressive Capital (IC), the investment arm of the market-entry firm, Ingressive has just announced that they are backing bike-sharing startup, AwaBike, in a pre-seed funding round.
IC is a venture fund focused on early-stage African tech startups. They cut checks between $50,000 and $100,000 for startups in seed stage up to pre-series A.
They have three Nigerian startups—OgaVenue, TaxiTV, Paystack and Tizeti—in their portfolio with one of them who raised a whopping $8 million in a Series A funding round in August.
However, with AwaBike they decided to take a different approach—pre-seed investing.
Although AwaBike was founded this year by Ifeoluwa Ogundipe, its ideation and conceptualisation started about a year ago, he tells Benjamin Dada. Later on, two others came on board— Damilola Olugbemi and Ibukun Tunde-Oni—as co-founders, handling the legal and business development aspects of the business respectively.
The company has said they will use the funds to drive their implementation phase by setting up shops in their selected communities and hiring key personnel.
“The seed round is very vital…as it means that the company can actually move to its implementation phase…We have some communities that have decided to partner with us and we absolutely cannot wait to make cycling cool again!”, said Founder AwaBike, Ifeoluwa Ogundipe.
In February, Lagos State signed a MoU with a French bike-sharing company, Smoove to set-up a 200-bike share project in Lagos. If that succeeds then startups like AwaBike might be able to latch onto the Government’s investment in bicycle-sharing as an alternative to four-wheeled automobiles.
Speaking to Oluwaseun “Olu” Oyinsan—Vice President, Investments at IC—about their investment into AwaBike he said, “We believe AwaBike is ahead of its time as in the near future it might be an alternative to ease the traffic congestion problem in Lagos. Their strategy is to start from University Campuses and closed estates to build adoption and scale before expanding to major cities”.
Around the world, we have seen an increased investment in two-wheeled automobiles. California-based electric mobility company, Lime scooters received $335 million from Uber, Alphabet and Google Ventures. Similarly, Lyft acquired Motivate to become America’s biggest bike-share company. So, it will not be far-fetched to say the Ingressive Capital team is eyeing a potential exit in the nearest future.
