A Bid to Lead Africa’s Drive into a $21 billion Electric Vehicle Future

Spiro, a company with about 9,400 motorcycles in Benin, Togo and Rwanda, will sign a $63 million debt financing agreement with French bank Société Générale and London-based financier GuarantCo. The funds will be used to import more bikes and batteries from Spiro’s China-based EV maker Horwin, CEO Jules Samain told Semafor Africa. Spiro had raised $65 million in equity from investors including the Africa Transformation and Industrialization Fund, an Abu Dhabi company. Some of that money is funding two electric motorcycle assembly and battery manufacturing plants being built in Benin and Togo and scheduled to open in 2024, Samain said. Spiro’s new raise comes a few weeks after Roam, a Swedish EV and solar energy company, moved into a newly built 10,000-square meter production plant located in Kenya’s capital Nairobi. The factory’s expected output is 50,000 bikes a year though it will take “a couple of years” to reach that maximum, the company said.

SEMAFOR