Why we invested in Swap, a battery-as-a-service company enabling electric last-mile transport in Nigeria

Urban mobility in Nigeria runs on informal transport. Tricycles, known locally as keke, carry millions of people every day in cities where formal mass transit remains limited. According to Nigeria’s National Bureau of Statistics, road transport accounts for more than 90 percent of passenger movement nation-wide¹, with informal and semi-formal vehicles forming the backbone of urban travel.

That backbone has been under serious strain. In mid-2023, the removal of Nigeria’s petrol subsidy sent fuel prices sharply higher, with pump prices rising from around ₦185 per litre to over ₦500 per litre in many states within months². Prices have continued to climb since: the National Bureau of Statistics recorded an average retail price of ₦1,051 per litre in February 2026³, with Lagos pump prices reaching ₦1,332 per litre by late March 2026 amid renewed global oil market volatility. For keke riders who buy fuel every single day, the shock was immediate. Naira depreciation compounded the problem, pushing up the cost of imported spare parts and engine repairs. Margins that were already thin grew even thinner.

Electric vehicles are the obvious long-term answer. But most EV models on the market require drivers to buy a new vehicle outright, commit to lease payments, or rely on charging infrastructure that does not exist at the scale or speed that informal urban transport demands. Electrification has remained, in practice, out of reach for the operators who need it most. Swap was built to change that.

Impact

Transport is responsible for roughly 24 percent of global energy-related CO₂ emissions, according to the International Energy Agency⁴. In Nigerian cities, small petrol-powered vehicles running continuous short-distance routes are a concentrated source of both carbon emissions and street-level air pollution. The health consequences are real: fine particulate matter (PM2.5) and nitrogen oxides from vehicle exhausts are directly linked to respiratory disease in high-density urban areas⁵.

When a keke converts to Swap’s system, it stops burning petrol entirely. Accounting for all emissions across the full energy chain (from generating the electricity used to charge the batteries, through to the vehicle moving on the road) Swap’s modelling suggests each converted tricycle produces significantly lower annual CO₂ emissions than its petrol equivalent. Tailpipe pollutants drop to zero. As Swap’s network grows, these gains compound: each additional vehicle converted is one fewer combustion engine running daily on crowded urban streets.

The economic impact is just as direct. Swap reports operating cost reductions of 30 to 45 percent for converted tricycles, driven by lower energy costs and the complete elimination of engine maintenance costs⁶. For a driver working six days a week in Lagos, that difference is felt every single day. Beyond the cost saving, there is a business continuity dimension that is easy to overlook: a converted keke is simply no longer exposed to fuel scarcity. Periodic supply disruptions at petrol stations have long forced drivers to park their vehicles for hours or even days at a time, losing income entirely. Running on electricity removes that vulnerability. Over time, Swap’s payment data creates a repayment record for riders who are largely invisible to formal lenders - a foundation for credit access that the company is beginning to build on.

Innovation

What makes Swap distinctive is not just its technology - but also the way the model is structured around how informal transport operators actually work and earn. Rather than selling or leasing vehicles, Swap converts a driver’s existing tricycle using a proprietary retrofit kit, at no upfront cost to the driver. The company recoups this investment through a small daily fee each time a rider swaps a depleted battery for a charged one. Payments are cashless and calibrated to daily earning rhythms. There is no large financial commitment to make, no new vehicle to finance, and no change to how a driver organises their working day.

Battery swapping, rather than plug-in charging, is what makes this operationally viable. A full exchange at a Swap station takes under five minutes, meaning vehicles lose virtually no working time. Swap owns and manages all batteries and stations, enabling centralised performance monitoring and controlled battery lifecycles. A proprietary locking system ensures batteries can only be recharged within the Swap network, protecting against loss and misuse while keeping the asset base tightly managed.

There is also a sustainability logic embedded in the retrofit approach that goes beyond fuel savings. By extending the useful life of an existing vehicle rather than manufacturing a new one, each conversion avoids the substantial carbon cost of producing a new EV from scratch, estimated at ten to fifteen tonnes of CO₂ per vehicle across the manufacturing lifecycle⁷. This matters in a market where circular economy thinking is not just environmentally sound but economically essential.

Finally, Swap is building its station infrastructure as an open network rather than a closed system. The company is positioning its swap stations to serve other EV operators (not just its own converted vehicles) which distributes station costs across a broader base and embeds Swap as foundational infrastructure for Nigeria’s broader electrification effort.

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Growth Potential

Nigeria is one of the most structurally compelling markets for commercial electric mobility on the continent. With a population exceeding 220 million⁸ and rapid urbanisation concentrating economic activity in a handful of dense cities, the demand for low-cost, high-frequency urban transport is deeply embedded. Tricycles and minibuses are not a transitional feature of the Nigerian city: they are its circulatory system. And their economics are acutely sensitive to fuel prices.

Swap entered this market with deliberate discipline, starting with tricycles before expanding into minibuses and exploring fleet partnerships across the mobility sector. The company’s capital structure is designed to match this trajectory. Rather than relying on equity to fund each additional kit, Swap ties debt financing directly to the cash flows of deployed vehicles, a structure well-suited to infrastructure-like, revenue-generating assets and one that mirrors the financing logic used successfully by distributed energy companies across emerging markets⁹. Early progress with local lenders suggests this approach is gaining traction. As that operational track record builds, the company's financing costs should improve materially - a trajectory common to infrastructure businesses that graduate from early-stage local capital to institutional lenders with dedicated emerging-market mandates.

The opportunity is not limited to tricycles. Swap has begun piloting conversions for minibuses and exploring partnerships with larger fleet operators, each representing a significant step up in addressable vehicles. Government programmes at the state level are also emerging as a channel, signalling that institutional demand for cost-effective fleet electrification is beginning to form. These early signals point toward a market that is broader and more varied than the pilot stage suggested.

Operationally, Swap is building toward a model that can scale without linear growth in central headcount. A franchise-like structure for station operations, combined with co-location partnerships that share infrastructure costs, is designed to let the network expand efficiently as deployment grows. The team of founders (with backgrounds spanning power engineering, operations, and commercial development) has demonstrated an ability to iterate quickly on both technology and business model in response to real-world conditions.

Team and Partnerships

Nigeria’s e-mobility space is growing busier, which makes the question of who is best positioned to win it increasingly important. On this, we have conviction. Swap’s founding team, spanning power engineering, operations, and commercial development, has shown not only the ability to build but the ability to iterate. They have refined the retrofit technology in response to real-world conditions, improved battery capacity, and adapted the operational model across multiple vehicle types without losing focus on unit economics. In a sector where many ventures have struggled to cross from pilot to commercial traction, such disciplined execution is not a given.

Equally important is where Swap has chosen to build its relationships. Rather than going around informal transport networks, the company has worked directly with transport unions and local associations - the bodies that actually govern how keke riders organise their working lives in Nigerian cities. This has generated a waitlist of over 100,000 vehicles across more than ten cities, a figure that reflects genuine demand rather than speculative interest. Partnerships with municipal transport authorities further strengthen Swap’s position, providing access to public fleet programmes that no purely commercial player could easily replicate. These relationships are not easily acquired, and they represent a competitive moat that deepens with every new city the company enters.

Conclusion

We invested in Swap because it addresses a clear and pressing vulnerability at the intersection of climate adaptation, urban mobility, and livelihoods. Millions of Nigerians depend on a transport system whose economics were already stretched before the fuel subsidy removal made things materially worse. Swap offers those operators a practical, affordable way out - one that does not ask them to change how they work, take on financial risk, or wait for infrastructure that does not yet exist.

What strikes us about the model is how the incentives align. Drivers save money from day one. Lenders have a recoverable, revenue-generating asset. The environment benefits as petrol engines are retired from dense urban use. And as the network grows, each new station becomes more valuable to every operator on it. That kind of compounding logic, grounded in the realities of how Nigerian cities actually move, is why we are backing Swap and why we believe the opportunity ahead of them is substantial.