This archive report was first published on 3 July 2019.
Rwanda's SafeMotos Rebrands to CanGo, Launches in Kinshasa ¶
July 3, 2019
SafeMotos, a Kigali-based on-demand ride-hailing platform focusing on motorcycle taxis, has officially launched in Kinshasa, DRC, and rebranded to CanGo.africa to bolster its super app ambitions.
Speaking to TechMoran, Barrett Nash, co-founder and CEO of SafeBoda, said, “CanGo is just one letter off of Congo, while not limiting us to Congo but an opportunity to launch FoodGo, AlcoholGo and everything CanGo. To many people ‘safe’ means slow and expensive while ‘motos’ is not recognized in many markets. CanGo is a more mature brand we’re getting behind, with better flexibility.”
CanGo aims to become a single app that provides many on-demand services in one, similar to Glovo and Lynk. According to Nash, the company is excited to be a first mover in Kinshasa, Africa’s third biggest city, and believes that it can grow into a dominant player in the market.
SafeMotos was founded by Nash and his Kenyan co-founder Peter Kariuki, who met while living in Kigali. The company started as a solution to the problem of motorcycle taxis in Kigali, where Nash and Kariuki would often take taxis to meet at their favorite bars.
“We’d always jump off and go ‘wow, that guy almost killed me’,” Nash said. “As aspiring entrepreneurs at the time we decided to do something about it: let’s make motorcycle taxis safe to use. We made a pitch deck, were approached by a startup accelerator, managed to get some seed money and we were off to the races.”
CanGo has already trained a cohort of female drivers in Kigali and is investigating opening a school for drivers in Kinshasa. The company aims to create a defensible ecosystem of services in Kinshasa and then expand to other cities in Africa.
“We believe that making our drivers recognized as being of a high caliber, as well as getting to the right level of trip volume, allows us to leverage stakeholders to allow access. At the end of the day, SafeMotos is a positive thing for a city as it professionalizes a highly informal marketplace,” Nash said.
