Mecho Autotech, Nigerian startup secures $2.15m seed funding

Mecho Autotech, a Nigerian vehicle repair and maintenance startup, has raised $2.15 million in seed funding to expand its capacities and acquire more customers.

Olusegun Owoade and Ayoola Akinkunmi founded Mecho Autotech in 2021 to provide repair and maintenance services to businesses and consumers through in-house and third-party service capacity that has passed rigorous assessments.

The company has workshop – Mecho Shops – and mobile service – Mecho Mobile – capabilities, and has onboarded over 7,000 third-party mechanics to its platform so far. It was a participant in the S21 batch of the Y Combinator accelerator last year, and it received funding from Ingressive Capital.

Future Africa, Hoaq Capital, Cathexis Ventures, V8 Capital, Silver Squid, and Tekedia Capital participated in the seed round, which raised $2.15 million. The round was oversubscribed by more than 300%. Mecho Autotech plans to use the funds to expand its multi-channel service capacity, engineering team, and B2C marketing budget.

So far, the startup has built three Mecho Shops across Lagos, and it plans to continue expanding its capacity. Its B2B customers include some of Nigeria’s largest corporate fleets, including Uber partner Moove, Tolaram Group, and UAC Group, and the startup plans to expand into B2C through a subscription service model and individual service requests.

Furthermore, Mecho is developing a spare parts value chain that has already served over 100 third-party mechanics as well as several large ticket inventory purchases for B2B customers.

“When you consider the state of used cars in Nigeria and the state of our roads, car maintenance isn’t an option.” We want to make high-quality vehicle repair and maintenance easy, convenient, and affordable for Nigerians. “Our goal is to create a maintenance culture in Nigeria and beyond that will keep roads and people safe,” Owoade said.

Future Africa’s founder and general partner, Iyinoluwa Aboyeji, stated that his fund’s thesis was to back founders solving difficult problems in large markets.

“With over 12 million cars on our roads and more on the way, leveraging technology to bring order to vehicle maintenance and repair is overdue. We are delighted to work with the Mecho Autotech team as they brilliantly execute on building out the vehicle repair value chain across Africa and create new and decent highly skilled auto repair jobs,” he said.