By Adedapo Adesanya
Nigerian vehicle repair and maintenance startup, Mecho Autotech, has raised a $2.15 million seed funding round to expand its capacities and acquire more customers.
The seed round was oversubscribed by 300 per cent and featured participation from Future Africa, Hoaq Capital, Cathexis Ventures, V8 Capital, Silver Squid and Tekedia Capital.
The company has both workshop – Mecho Shops – and mobile service – Mecho Mobile – capabilities, and has so far onboarded over 7,000 third-party mechanics to its platform.
Mecho Autotech will now use the capital to expand its multi-channel service capacity, engineering team, and marketing budget for B2C acquisition.
Last year, in the same year it was established, the company was a participant in the S21 batch of the Y Combinator accelerator, and raised funding from Ingressive Capital.
The startup has so far built three Mecho Shops across Lagos and will continue to expand this capacity.
Its B2B customers include some of Nigeria’s largest corporate fleets including Uber partner Moove, Tolaram Group, and UAC Group, while the startup aims to grow in B2C via a subscription service model and individual service requests.
Moreover, Mecho is developing a spare parts value chain that has already served over 100 third-party mechanics and several large ticket inventory purchases for B2B customers.
According to Mr Olusegun Owoade, the chief executive officer of the company, there will be further automation of the industry in order to make things easier for Nigerians.
“When you consider the state of Nigeria’s used cars and our roads, car maintenance isn’t optional. We want to automate high-quality vehicle repair and maintenance for Nigerians by making it easy, convenient, and affordable.
“We aspire to build a maintenance culture in Nigeria and beyond to keep roads and people safe,” he said.
According to Mr Iyinoluwa Aboyeji, Future Africa’s founder and general partner, his fund’s thesis was to back founders solving hard 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.
Founded in 2021 by Mr Olusegun Owoade and Mr Ayoola Akinkunmi, Mecho Autotech offers repair and maintenance services to businesses and consumers through in-house and third-party service capacity which has passed rigorous assessments.
Aduragbemi Omiyale 
Modupe Gbadeyanka