Biography:
Matthew Sellar is the co-founder of Mbay Mobility, a Senegalese startup enabling taxi drivers to buy electric vehicles (EVs) on credit. Mbay has financed 25 vehicles to date, and has raised over $400K.
Their goal is to deploy EVs at speed and at scale in West and Central Africa, combatting air pollution and carbon emissions while increasing financial inclusion.
Prior to Mbay, Matthew spent a decade in the international development space. He worked for what is now the UK’s FCDO, and the UK embassy in Dakar. He also previously founded four startups.
Matthew holds a bachelors in economics from Edinburgh University, and a masters in economics from SOAS University of London.
Your first entrepreneurial venture was a sort of “Airbnb for Cuba”. Can you explain?
I consider myself a left-leaning economist. I believe in the necessity of political-economy analysis and state intervention to achieve desirable societal and economic outcomes. I was doing my masters at SOAS, and Cuba fascinated me because it stood out.
According to classic, neoliberal economic doctrine, Cuba should be the biggest failed state in the world, due to its centrally-planned socialist model. The truth is that it sports high levels of human development, low levels of violence… Life is made harder under the embargo, but it isn’t the “catastrophe” their economic model was supposed to yield.
I planned to visit Cuba, to learn more. I tried booking a homestay, because I needed proof of lodging to get my visa. Local homestay websites looked and felt incredibly amateur, straight out of the 90s, and booking something was a clunky affair.
When I arrived in Cuba, I realized that the pain was shared by the homeowners too, as they were never sure their guests would arrive, given the absence of pre-payment, formal confirmation emails, etc. I set out to build a simple click-book system, for travellers to easily book homestays and reduce risk and logistics Cuban homeowners.
I couldn’t formalize the company in Cuba obviously (the socialist government there wasn’t a fan of private enterprises), but I ran it as a side-project from the UK. Airbnb even got in touch with us when they tried expanding to Cuba, but we had a massive bug in the website that turned them off.
The website is still live, although I gave it to my former general manager in Cuba. She sometimes calls me for advice, and still generates a nice bit of income from it. I’m happy with that outcome.
You worked in the international development space for a decade. In Africa, it seems like these organizations have pivoted to private sector support, including startups. Is that true?
It has come in addition to existing initiatives. At the core of international development lies a few core objectives (education, infrastructure, health, good governance) that can’t be “replaced” by tech startup support. That being said, startup support has indeed increased. It’s attractive to aid organizations for multiple reasons.
First, from a high-level perspective, the Thatcher-Reagan years cemented neoliberalism as the dominant economic doctrine, leading to an increased belief in the private sector’s power to spur development.
Second, these organizations are subject to stringent reporting requirements. It isn’t always easy to quantify progress on those “core objectives” I mentioned, whereas progress on tech startup support can be clearly distilled through the number of companies created, number of jobs created, fundraising numbers, etc.
Third, tech startups disrupt existing ways of doing things and formalize parts of what are still heavily informal economies. This is good for economic development, so the work tech startups do often aligns with the international development agenda.
In conclusion, the aid sector’s support for tech startups is definitely positive, but it must continue to be a complement to other, more fundamental and structural work.
RO insights: the impact of aid money on startup ecosystems
In young startup ecosystems, international aid can play a similar role to public money: an initial catalytic push, in order to get private capital interested. However, aid money can come with strings attached that don’t match startups’ needs.
Here’s how Ahmad Sufian Bayram, who now works at Syria’s new Ministry of Communications and Information Technology, explains:
“The risk is creating a donor-dependent ecosystem, which is unfortunately already the case for Syria’s neighbors.
Donors often arrive with a priority they deem important but which doesn’t reflect the local ecosystem’s needs. I predict the arrival of EU-funded “greentech” accelerators. While greentech is great, it’s far from the Syrian ecosystem’s first order of business.
Donor money can also attract the wrong types of founders. If grants are easy money, some ‘founders’ will jump from pitch competition to pitch competition without ever building anything substantial. For those who do build, donor money can be linked to irrelevant milestones and heavy reporting requirements that hurt founders’ progress.”
Excerpt from Reviving the Syrian startup scene, originally published in The Realistic Optimist
What problem is Mbay solving?
We solve two problems; severe pollution caused by old fossil-fuel vehicles, and financial exclusion for large parts of the population working in the informal sector.
Petrol-fueled cars create toxic pollution in large urban centers across Western and Central Africa. Mbay replaces those vehicles with EVs, promoting cleaner air and bettering public health in the process. Our early adopters are taxi drivers, who we help switch out their petrol-fueled car for an EV.
Once we have enabled taxi drivers to acquire the EVs on a lease-to-own model (ie: regular repayments eventually lead to ownership), we help them use this new asset as collateral to unlock follow-on financial services, like microcredit and microinsurance. There’s a crucial financial inclusion and formalisation element to our work.
What did your MVP look like and how did you muster up initial traction?