Host: Jason Jacobs
Guest: Jesse Forrester | Founder & CEO | Mazi Mobility
Category: ⚡ Renewable Energy | Mobility As A Service
Podcast’s Essential Bites:
[5:11] “Mazi Mobility is a mobility as a service company based in Nairobi, Kenya. We assemble and sell electric motorcycles, as well as build and operate the infrastructure that supports that. We started in April of 2021 […] and are pushing forward in making sure that we can have more electric motorcycles on the road.”
[6:44] “Motorcycles the fastest growing vehicle segment on the continent, growing about 15% CAGR and over 250,000 of them in Kenya registered every single year. That number is going up to 300,000. And they’re absolutely necessary for movement in a city and in East Africa. They are estimated to be about 1.6 million and support about 5.2 million households of people directly and indirectly.”
[11:02] “Air pollution affects millions of people in developing markets. And if you're on the road, inhaling fumes all the time for about like 10 hours, 6 days a week, it becomes such a problem. […] [There are] different factors from a social standpoint […] that we said we could help [with], but […] also […] paired with an economic incentive to really make sure that it will work out.”
[11:50] “Electric motorcycles are great, but when you buy one, the first thing you think about is where am I going to charge my motorcycle. […] This is the second biggest sticking point to preventing the mass adoption of these electric bikes. Mazi as a company saw as a real interesting opportunity not only to deliver value, but to capture value as a business. And we started out by developing our own swapping stations, where we own the IP. And they work in a way that a motorcycle rider who buys a Mazzi motorcycle is able to look at a […] mobile app and know exactly how much battery charge is left in the battery on a motorcycle, where the next swapping station is going to be and […] be routed to a swapping station and […] can do a swap in under a minute.”
[15:13] “We've got two different customer focuses. So the lowest hanging fruit is the B2B side of the market. So these are delivery companies that own fleets of motorcycles, and then do food delivery, personal delivery, ride hailing. And then you've also got the individuals. […] The biggest one is definitely the B2C side of individual customers. I think they comprise more than 95% of the market, and are really the ones we are targeting in the medium to long term.”
[34:22] “You will probably mostly see climate adaptation strategies as solutions here as opposed to climate mitigation strategies, which we're doing with electric mobility. But we just think that transport is such an integral part to development of any other sector, and that it just needs to happen from this particular perspective. […] This is the beginning to shift as more motorcycles actually come in, and there's more visibility. […] We're seeing more consumers starting to care [about] driving an electric bike and even a sense of pride […], because [they] are contributing to making sure the air is cleaner.”
Rating: ⚡⚡⚡
🎙️ Full Episode: Apple | Spotify | Google (Original Title: "Startup Series: Mazi Mobility")
🕰️ 52 min | 🗓️ 06/16/2022
✅ Time saved: 50 min
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