Insights from an entrepreneur leading Africa’s EV revolution

When Josh Whale decided to launch an e-mobility startup in East Africa, many people — from casual observers to investors to potential manufacturing partners — questioned his logic. 

“There was an inbuilt assumption when we started that electric vehicles were something for wealthy eco-warriors,” he says.

And yet, when Whale’s company, Ampersand, piloted its first 20 electric motorcycles in Kigali in 2019, they proved such a sensation that their test drivers were swarmed at traffic lights and parking lots. The company had to draw up leaflets on the fly to explain what they were up to. Within six weeks, 1,300 riders had come to them and asked to be put on their waitlist.

Fast forward nine years from its start, and Ampersand has grown from the first to one of the largest electric mobility startups in Africa’s rapidly emerging EV landscape. With a focus on electric motorcycles for commercial drivers, the Acumen PEII+ investee has now deployed more than 5,800 e-motos in Kenya and Rwanda and plans to scale to more countries soon. Ampersand was recently featured in an Acumen film for BBC StoryWorks Humanising Energy series. 

Below is an abridged transcript of our conversation. 

Q: When you started Ampersand, what was the hardest thing to convince people of?

Josh: We launched Ampersand in 2016 just after Tesla had made electric vehicles cool. They had been dorky things that were slow and couldn’t go far. Suddenly, George Clooney is driving an electric sports car that has better acceleration than a Porsche. That was a big assumption we had to overcome with investors and suppliers, especially in China, where most of the mobility industry was at the time. Talking to these guys, they were like, “People in Africa can’t afford this. You have to sell them the cheapest thing possible.” In contrast, we were saying, “This is not a consumer vehicle. We’re targeting commercial drivers. If our product breaks down, they can’t just hop on the metro. This is their livelihood, so we need reliability, durability, and most of all, high quality. This can’t be a piece of junk that breaks down six months later.” So that was the mind shift change that we had to tackle, as opposed to convincing customers. Everyone told us that people in Rwanda and Kenya were going to be really skeptical about this because it was new technology. We had the absolute opposite experience.

Q: Why do you think customers were so quick to embrace Ampersand?

Josh: We were determined to minimize behavior change and make the math as much of an apples-to-apples comparison as possible. Here’s how much you spend on your bike. Here’s how much you spend with our bike. This is how much you spend on gas. This is how much you’ll save by not paying for gas. We built our battery swapping stations into the existing infrastructure for gas stations so that drivers could follow the same routine. So everywhere we were requiring as little behavior change as possible. The reason we launched in Rwanda and Kenya was not by accident. We did exhaustive research to zero in on a market where these comparisons would be as favorable for us as possible. East Africa is a place where fuel is incredibly expensive. Within East Africa, if you look at the miles driven per day by commercial drivers in Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania, and Rwanda, Rwanda and Kenya come out on top. So that’s where we started. 

Q: Can you give us an example of how Ampersand has transformed customers’ lives? 

Josh: Early on, we started noticing a discrepancy in where our customers were riding. We track all our batteries in real time. We know how much power they’re consuming in real time. We use that to inform our network mapping. We noticed that the shape of the network was changing and that riders were going further out, and that some of the swap stations on the urban periphery had more demand than we anticipated, especially towards the end of the day. We thought, “Oh no! Is there something wrong with our algorithm or our data here? Is there a bug?” We got in touch with some of the drivers, and they said, “I’ve saved so much money from this electric motorbike that I’ve bought land outside of the city and moved my family and am sending my kids to better schools.” We had to increase the size of our swap stations on the outskirts of the city for all these people who were making so much more money. That was one of the first signs that what we were doing was changing lives. 

Q: What does the future of electric mobility in Africa look like in the next five to 10 years?

Josh: It really depends on investors. We could make every motorbike in Africa electric within 10 years, probably less. We could do it for about a third of what riders spend annually on petrol and gasoline — less than one year’s margin. That would be like covering the total cost of covering your roof with solar panels with just four months of power bills. It’s wild how little it would take in terms of capital. But in Africa, there’s been a big gap in suitable equity capital. When you combine a string of high-profile startup failures with a lack of exits for African VCs, you have a real challenge. Investors that are looking at Africa have pushed towards the debt side of the boat. They want to give out loans rather than invest and take shares in companies. We could have expanded into other markets, but we had to prioritize becoming profitable as quickly as possible so that we weren’t reliant on VCs. 

Q: What role do investors like Acumen play in your growth strategy?

Josh: Acumen is one of the rare investors on the other side of the boat trying to balance things out. Rather than being fixated on risk, Acumen takes more of a macro approach and focuses on the fundamentals of the business. Does the technology make sense? Is there a product market fit? Do customers get it and like the product? Is the product or service creating opportunity in the community? They’ve been incredible partners. It’s very hard for startups like ours that don’t have a large team of senior people to pursue investors. We’re running the business and developing the tech at the same time as trying to find capital.

“It’s really important that there are investors like Acumen who are willing to partner and share your conviction and are looking to help you scale. I wish there were more investors like them in the ecosystem.”

Josh Wale, Founder and CEO of Ampersand

Q: What’s a lesson from building Ampersand that applies far beyond electric mobility, something any entrepreneur should know?

Josh: When we put our first bikes on the road, we did it in stealth mode because people said, “Oh, as soon as the big motorbike companies see that this works and that customers like it, they’re going to put all their resources behind it, and they’ll crush you. You don’t have a chance.” To this day, investors tell me that the big corporations are going to come in and smash us. What I’ve learned is that’s just not how big corporations work. They’re like supertankers that move fuel around the world. Once they get going in a particular direction, they have a huge amount of inertia, and it takes a long time to make even a slight change in trajectory. In Africa, even if the market is so much larger, even if there is near limitless potential, they’ll still gravitate towards what they know and what’s easy and low risk. So my advice would be, don’t let the presence of big corporations deter you. The story of disruption is one that’s been told time and time again.