Africa’s largest electric mobility company, SPIRO, has appointed Anant Badjatya as its inaugural Group Chief Executive Officer, a structural leadership move announced on June 9, 2026. The appointment follows the company’s $215 million equity raise and signals a shift from rapid market entry into what the company frames as a more disciplined phase of continental scaling.
A New Layer of Leadership
The Group CEO role is a new position at SPIRO, created specifically to bring greater coordination across the company’s expanding operations. Badjatya will consolidate SPIRO’s strategic initiatives and steer the company through what Founder and Chairman Gagan Gupta has described as its “next chapter of growth and execution in mobility, energy and tech.”
Badjatya arrives with a resume built squarely around battery swapping at scale. He most recently served as CEO of Indofast Energy, a joint venture between IndianOil and SUN Mobility, where he built one of India’s largest battery-swapping networks serving roughly 90,000 vehicles daily. That operational profile is not incidental; battery swapping sits at the core of SPIRO’s business model, and importing that expertise from one of the world’s most advanced swapping ecosystems gives the company a meaningful edge as it grows.
Badjatya brings over two decades of leadership experience spanning India, the Middle East, and Africa.
What SPIRO Has Built
Since its founding in 2022, SPIRO has grown into a formidable presence across the continent. The company currently operates more than 100,000 electric motorcycles across Kenya, Rwanda, Uganda, Togo, Benin, Nigeria, and Cameroon, supported by over 2,500 battery-swapping stations and more than 30 million completed swaps.
Beyond the bikes, SPIRO has built manufacturing and assembly plants in Kenya, Rwanda, and Uganda, a battery recycling facility in Nigeria, and a workforce of 6,000 employees. The company holds more than 30 proprietary patents and employs over 150 engineers, underlining an industrial depth that goes well beyond a simple fleet operator.
For commercial riders across the continent, the practical impact is measurable: SPIRO’s electric motorcycles offer daily cost savings of up to $2 compared to petrol-powered alternatives, a significant margin for boda boda and okada riders whose livelihoods depend on fuel costs.
The Capital Behind the Expansion
The $215 million equity round, backed by Impact Fund Denmark and Equitane, is one of the largest single investments ever recorded in Africa’s electric mobility sector. It follows a $50 million debt facility and a $100 million round completed in October 2025, putting SPIRO’s total recent funding north of $365 million.
That war chest is earmarked for a broad mandate spanning battery swapping infrastructure, vehicle leasing, logistics, energy services, and local vehicle manufacturing. The Democratic Republic of the Congo and Ethiopia are the next target markets, both identified for their significant transport and logistics potential.
From Build-Out to Execution
Badjatya’s appointment is less about replacing outgoing CEO Kaushik Burman and more about adding strategic horsepower at the top as the company moves into a harder phase of growth. Entering the DRC and Ethiopia, managing cross-country manufacturing operations, and scaling a battery-swapping network to match demand across seven-plus markets demands a different kind of leadership than the early build-out phase required.
SPIRO has made its bet: a leader who has already solved battery swapping at scale in a high-volume, price-sensitive market is best placed to compress the learning curve in Africa. With over $365 million in funding, a continental footprint, and a new Group CEO in place, the company is positioning itself to move from Africa’s largest e-mobility player to its most operationally mature one.
