Ethiopia has banned the import of petrol and diesel motorcycles. That policy decision — bold, blunt, and still working through the market — created a problem for hundreds of thousands of urban delivery riders and transport entrepreneurs in Addis Ababa who depend on two-wheelers for their livelihoods. It also created an opening. Yuma Sasaki, a Japanese entrepreneur who moved to Ethiopia to build something nobody else was building there, walked through it.
Dodai, the electric mobility startup Sasaki founded in Addis Ababa in 2023, closed a $13 million Series A in May 2026. British International Investment led the round alongside a group of Japanese and impact-focused investors. The raise — split between $8 million in equity and $5 million in debt — will fund the expansion of Dodai’s battery-swapping network and the scaling of its electric motorbike fleet across the Ethiopian capital.
The Battery Swap Bet That Changes the EV Calculus
Electric vehicles have promised to transform African urban transport for a decade. The promise keeps running into the same wall: charging infrastructure. Building a network of charging stations requires capital, land, reliable electricity, and time. In a country where electricity access remains uneven and load-shedding is a constant variable, a charging-dependent EV business carries structural risk that investors price heavily.
Dodai does not wait for charging infrastructure to catch up. Its battery-swapping model lets a rider pull into a swap station, remove a depleted battery, and slot in a fully charged one in minutes — the functional equivalent of refuelling at a petrol station. Riders never charge at home. They never wait for a charge cycle to complete. The battery is the service, not a component the rider owns.
This model removes the most significant adoption barrier for delivery riders and transport entrepreneurs whose income depends on uptime. A motorcycle sitting at a charging point for two hours is revenue not earned. A battery swap that takes three minutes is not. Dodai has applied this logic to a market where the government has already eliminated the alternative by banning ICE imports, making the timing precise rather than aspirational.
By the time of the Series A close, Dodai had assembled and deployed more than 2,000 electric motorbikes in Addis Ababa, operating a localised assembly model with a workforce composed predominantly of Ethiopian employees. The company builds and operates the full stack: the vehicles, the batteries, and the swap infrastructure. Vertical integration at this stage is capital-intensive. It is also the only way to control the quality and reliability of a system where every component failure hits rider income directly.
“Dodai identified a significant gap between strong policy ambition around electric mobility and the practical realities faced by everyday users,” Sasaki said. “While Ethiopia has abundant renewable power and supportive regulation, charging infrastructure remains limited, electricity access is uneven, and consumers are under significant economic pressure.”
Why Ethiopia — and What the BII Bet Signals for African E-Mobility
Dodai’s geography is a deliberate counter-narrative. Most African mobility startups have concentrated on Kenya and Nigeria — larger markets, deeper early-stage capital networks, more established e-commerce and delivery ecosystems to supply with riders. Ethiopia is different. Its foreign exchange constraints and historically cautious investment environment have deterred investors who found Nairobi or Lagos easier to price.
The ICE import ban changed that calculus. It created demand for electric two- and three-wheelers that is not discretionary — riders who want to stay in business need an electric alternative, and they need it now. That mandatory demand, combined with Ethiopia’s expanding renewable energy capacity and a government that has made electrification a national priority, built the policy tailwind Dodai needed to attract institutional capital.
British International Investment’s participation carries weight beyond the dollar figure. BII — the UK’s development finance institution — does not write early-stage cheques lightly. Its investment thesis connects directly to the thesis it articulated around the deal: “BII’s investment will support Dodai to scale critical e-mobility and battery-swapping infrastructure and accelerate the development of a commercial market for electric motorbikes. By expanding access to affordable transport, Dodai is empowering entrepreneurs, creating jobs, and helping build a stronger, more competitive urban economy in Ethiopia,” said a BII spokesperson according to Disrupt Africa. That framing — infrastructure, not just mobility — is significant. Dodai is not a scooter rental startup. It is building the energy exchange network that makes electric transport viable for people who cannot absorb risk.
The Japanese investor participation — Nagase, Persistent ACV Fund, and For Seasons among the disclosed participants — reflects a separate logic. Japanese industrial and energy companies have been methodically building positions in African mobility infrastructure for several years. They understand battery chemistry, supply chains, and long-term infrastructure economics in ways that generalist VC funds often do not. Their presence alongside BII suggests that this round was assembled by investors who intend to be in this for the duration, not the exit horizon.
The competitive landscape in African electric two-wheelers is real but fragmented. Spiro operates battery-swap networks in Rwanda, Benin, and Togo. Ampersand has built a swap infrastructure in Rwanda and Kenya targeting motorcycle taxi riders. BasiGo has focused on electric buses in Kenya. None of them has concentrated on Ethiopia with the depth Dodai is bringing. The bet is that Ethiopia’s scale — the second most populous country in Africa, with a government actively removing the competition — justifies the infrastructure investment required to build a durable market position.
The Hard Part Ahead
Dodai’s challenges are characteristic of every infrastructure-heavy startup in an emerging market: supply chain constraints for battery components, uneven electricity access in the very network it relies on, and the capital intensity of building physical infrastructure at scale before revenue fully catches up. Sasaki acknowledged these directly. “Supply chain constraints for batteries and components have also required careful planning,” he said. That careful planning has to scale with the business.
Africa’s climate technology investment hit a record $1.18 billion in 2025, with energy and water infrastructure attracting $141 million in Q1 2026 alone — the second-largest sector by capital across the continent. Dodai operates in the exact intersection of mobility and clean energy where that capital is flowing. The $13 million Series A positions it to compete for a larger slice of the next funding cycle, provided it can demonstrate that its 2,000-motorbike deployment is a foundation, not a ceiling.
The race to electrify Africa’s urban transport has been running for years across a continent where the economics of fossil fuel dependence are becoming harder to sustain. What Dodai is attempting in Ethiopia is not a replication of what worked in Kenya or Rwanda. It is a model built for a specific regulatory moment in a specific market — and it secured institutional capital from investors who have decided that moment is real.
The next test is execution at scale. Battery swap networks are only as good as their density. Two thousand motorbikes and a handful of stations in Addis Ababa is a proof of concept. A city of five million people, with the ICE alternative eliminated by law, is the market. Africa’s EV ambitions have consistently outpaced infrastructure delivery — a gap Dodai is now funded to close, one swap station at a time.
