THE MOVE
In April 2024, BasiGo — a Nairobi-based electric-mobility company co-founded and led by Jit Bhattacharya — opened what it described as Kenya's first specialised assembly line for modern electric buses, on the Kenya Vehicle Manufacturers (KVM) floor in Thika, roughly 50 kilometres northeast of Nairobi. That single line is the physical anchor of a much larger wager the company calls the 'Road to 1000': a commitment to put 1,000 electric buses on Kenyan and Rwandan roads by 2027. To fund it, BasiGo closed a $42 million Series A in 2024 — $24 million of equity led by pan-African infrastructure investor Africa50, alongside a $10 million debt facility from the U.S. Development Finance Corporation for Kenya and $7.5 million from British International Investment for Rwanda.
The mechanism matters more than the vehicle. BasiGo does not sell buses to matatu operators; it finances them onto the road through a 'Pay-As-You-Drive' model. An operator puts down a deposit of roughly Sh1–1.5 million and then pays a per-kilometre fee — reported by Business Daily at around Sh65 per kilometre — that bundles energy, maintenance and a slice of the financing. BasiGo retains the balance-sheet risk on the vehicle, the battery and the charging network; the operator gets a bus without a four-year diesel loan. This is a fintech-and-infrastructure play wearing the body of a bus company.
The hardware is a King Long KL-9 battery-electric bus assembled under the BasiGo brand at Thika: 54 seats, a 300 kWh CATL battery, a two-hour full charge and up to 320 kilometres of range. In Rwanda, the fleet has skewed toward intercity work using Higer i8 coaches with CATL packs, ranges up to 350 kilometres and 10-year, one-million-kilometre warranties. As of late 2025 the combined operating fleet had passed 100 buses across Nairobi and Kigali, having carried more than 9 million passengers over more than 1.4 million kilometres — the numbers BasiGo and its backer Proparco cited when the French development-finance institution joined the cap table in November 2025 to 'scale local assembly, grow charging infrastructure, and accelerate its Road to 1000.'