Meet Shekel Mobility, A platform that offers a simpler, smarter, and faster way to launch and grow your car dealership locally or virtually. Shekel | Home (shekelmobility.com)
Shekel Mobility is a simplified financing & operating system for car dealers in Africa, founded by Benjamen, Sanmi, and Valentine. We share over 15 years of friendship, mobility, and technology background and remain committed to a common vision to drive business optimization for every car dealer in Africa.
Shekel Mobility, in a nutshell, provides a streamlined finance and operational platform for auto dealers, allowing them to create sustainable companies. The mobility firm began operations in January 2022 and has since grown to power more than $19 million in transactions with over 1,000 dealers in its ecosystem. This traction, along with the viability of the business solution, has led to their selection for the Y Combinator Winter 2023 Batch.
Shekel Mobility raised $1,950,000 in a pre-seed round that was oversubscribed. Ventures Platform led the investment round, with participation from other strategic investors such as Y Combinator, Voltron Capital, Zedcrest, and other angel investors. “Our goal is to ensure that every auto dealer in Africa and other emerging markets is able to access the right kind of capital to maximize the opportunities available”. As it stands, we have enabled local dealerships to grow their businesses 3x and we are pumped with a passion to see this grow exponentially,’’ Benjamen Oladokun, CBO and co-founder of Shekel Mobility, said.
Shekel Mobility dealers have been able to triple their sales by growing their inventory through access to our affordable finance. We are happy to engage strategic partners on this ambitious but exciting journey of building the largest Auto dealership ecosystem powering $10Billion dollars by the year 2025.
How does Shekel Mobility work?
To access credit from the mobility fintech, pre-approved dealers are required to provide at least 30% of the value of the vehicle they intend to purchase, Shekel Mobility disburses the 70% after vetting and validating the corresponding documents. Once the vehicle is purchased, it is housed in an approved car lot—the company also intends to own its car lot(s) in the coming months.
The company also provides dealers with assistance when they are unable to meet up with the stipulated time for the selling of the vehicle, they either help the dealer to sell it to a consumer or another dealer on the mobility fintech’s dealers’ network. “I have been able to buy and sell more cars than I used to before onboarding with Shekel,” according to Deebrainny Autos, a Nigerian SME car dealer who has used the mobility fintech for over six months.
Since its launch, Shekel Mobility has over 1000 car dealers in its network and has actively financed about 3500 vehicles worth $20 million—powering over $2 million transactions on a monthly basis. “Due to our credit model, we have a 0% default rate,” Benjamen said. “This is because we do not just offer credit but we have built an operating system for the dealers to run their transactions.”
In Q1 2023, the company wants to grow its transactions from 20% to 100% month-on-month. “Limited access to credit from financial institutions is one of our major challenges,” Sanmi said. Most of our funding comes from non-traditional institutions and VCs, However, we are seeing a future where these financial institutions will be willing to partner with us.” Although Shekel Mobility still leverages its equity funding, the company is now prioritizing getting more debt funding to push its business model across the continent and other emerging markets.
