NeoFleet, a Cyprus-based mobility finance company that operates in Senegal, Côte d’Ivoire, and Peru, has raised a $4 million pre-seed round to scale its professional taxi fleet financing model and build infrastructure for autonomous mobility.
DMTech VC, a venture fund that focuses on fintech and asset-backed finance, backed the round alongside other private investors. Mark Loughran, former president and chief financial officer (CFO) of ride-hailing company inDrive, also participated in the round and has joined NeoFleet as president and co-founder. The company said the round includes a mix of equity and debt.
Vehicles in Sub-Saharan Africa cost about 8% more than the global average, according to 2021 World Bank data compiled by TheGlobalEconomy, with a vehicle-price index of 107.74, compared with a global benchmark of 100. NeoFleet Capital wants to finance drivers and businesses that cannot access the vehicle financing they need to earn money.
“We address a fundamental problem in many high-growth mobility markets: people need rides, drivers want to work, and capital is the missing piece to put more cars on the road,” Loughran said in a statement.
Founded in 2024 by Igor Shiyanov and Oleg Mosyazh, NeoFleet finances and manages vehicle fleets for professional mobility operators. As of October 2026, the company says it network includes 650 vehicles with an approximate purchase value of $10 million.
The company was built around what it describes as a financing gap where banks often lack the credit models and risk appetite to finance taxi fleets, leaving professional operators with limited access to capital for expansion.
“NeoFleet bridges that gap: we provide professional fleet operators with capital to grow and create the infrastructure that allows institutional capital to access the taxi asset class at scale,” Shiyanov, NeoFleet’s chief executive officer, told TechCabal.
NeoFleet said the $4 million will finance the expansion of its existing operations and entry into new mobility markets. The company plans to deploy 1,000 vehicles across its network by the end of 2026 and 5,000 by the end of 2027, which it estimates would represent between $75 million and $100 million in vehicle value.
NeoFleet’s business is built around what it calls a Fleet Management Franchise model, combining vehicle financing, fleet-management technology, operations and maintenance, and insurance. The company says it is building its technology layer around fleet and driver scoring, telematics, vehicle monitoring, maintenance management, and payment control.
“We are rolling this model out progressively,” Shiyanov said. “We typically start by financing established fleet operators, then increase our control over the asset through direct vehicle ownership or instalment-sale structures, and ultimately integrate these capabilities into the full Fleet Management Franchise.”
NeoFleet said it does not use one ownership model across all of its markets. In some transactions, it provides secured financing to an established fleet operator, which then acquires and owns the vehicles. In others, NeoFleet buys the vehicles itself and rents them to local fleet operators.
The company also uses instalment-sale structures where fleet operators acquire vehicles and pay over an agreed period. Its customers are primarily professional taxi and ride-hailing fleet operators that have limited access to traditional bank financing.
Neofleet generates revenue through interest and fees on financing provided to fleet operators, as well as rental income from vehicles it owns. As it develops the Fleet Management Franchise, it expects to add revenue from software, maintenance, insurance, and other fleet services.
The company says it has built several layers of protection into its model. Before providing financing, the company conducts due diligence and credit assessments on fleet operators. It also uses relationships with ride-hailing platforms and other market data to identify established operators. The vehicles are insured and monitored through telematics such as location and vehicle-status data.
When an operator falls behind on payments, NeoFleet first works with them to determine whether the problem is temporary and whether the payment schedule can be cured or restructured. If that fails, its security structure and vehicle monitoring allow it to recover the vehicle and redeploy it with another fleet operator, according to the company.
The model puts NeoFleet in a market with bigger players trying to solve the vehicle-financing gap, including Moove and Autochek. The company, however, has a longer-term bet on how commercial mobility would evolve. It believes the infrastructure required to run today’s professional taxi fleets could become useful for autonomous vehicles. Even without drivers, autonomous fleets will still need financing, insurance, charging, maintenance, repairs, monitoring, and day-to-day fleet management.
“We believe autonomous mobility will be one of the most important structural shifts in transportation,” Shiyanov said. “In Africa, we expect human-driven and autonomous vehicles to coexist for some time, but the shift will come, and the markets that prepare early will be best placed to benefit.”
NeoFleet said it is evaluating more than 15 countries for its next expansion phase and plans to select two to three new markets. It focuses on Latin America, Africa, Southeast Asia and the Middle East. In the longer term, it sees potential in developed markets including the United States, the United Kingdom, and the European Union.
The company will continue to expand in Senegal, Côte d’Ivoire, and Peru while evaluating those new markets. For now, its goal is to turn its existing fleet-financing operation into a platform connecting capital with mobility assets, and eventually have that same infrastructure ready when autonomous fleets begin scaling across emerging markets.
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