TaxiTV, a Nigerian advertising tech startup has just completed a seed funding round led by Beta.Ventures. This is the first announced round of funding in Nigeria in Q3.
TaxiTv provides entertainment in ride-sharing vehicles such as Uber and Taxify. Speaking to Business Insider, Akinbola Asalu, Co-Founder and CEO of TaxiTV shared that the new funding will help to scale and expand its operations.
It’s business as usual for us at @RideWithTaxiTV pic.twitter.com/0JeDDAcaPT
— akinbola (@Akasalu) May 28, 2018
“We are really excited about this, it would help us achieve the vision we have for the company and get the product to other parts of the country”, he said.
He revealed that the startup raised between $50,000 and $100,000 in this round of funding.
Other investors who participated include Collins Onuegbu of SASWARE, Sam Senbanjo of Neon Ventures among a few other prominent individual investors.
TaxiTV Provide Ads in Ride Sharing Services Like Uber
TaxiTv provides entertainment in ride-sharing vehicles such as Uber and Taxify. The startup is still a relatively young company. It was founded in October 2017 by Akinbola Asalu, CEO, and Dami Osiyale, COO.
“Back in October, when we, Co-founder Akinbola Asalu and Dami Osiyale came up with the concept for TaxiTV, we envisioned that it was a crazy and unimaginable concept”, the company said in a Medium post.
We are signing up drivers and fleets that are partners with Uber, Taxify and others.
If you know anyone who is in this category, they can sign up on https://t.co/Mg3SDbZTQ5 and our agent will attend to them within minutes.
They can make up to 10,000 Naira per week.🚕 pic.twitter.com/C81s7UHA2V
— Taxi TV (@RideWithTaxiTV) December 15, 2017
The startup imports a similar ad-solution already in use by taxis all across the Western world. It displays ads via touch-screen devices which are strapped on to the car seats for riders to view. Like Google’s Adsense, TaxiTV pays the drivers for displaying these ads.
Leveraging the sharing economy that has helped grown companies like Uber and AirBnB, TaxiTV does not own the touchscreen devices. Drivers purchase these devices themselves and install them in their cars while TaxiTV loads these devices up with display and video ads.
We hit our milestone for driver signups today!!! Abdul Rahman becomes the 150th driver on our platform 👏🏾👏🏾 #RideWithTaxiTV pic.twitter.com/BFrSZTsK8J
— Taxi TV (@RideWithTaxiTV) June 5, 2018
The first car powered with TaxiTV ads hit the road in November 2017. But in January 2018, its ads became fully functional, growing from one content provider to eight. The number of drivers using its ads platform grew at an “astronomical rate”, and is now found in 150 taxis in Nigeria.
For its ad services, the company is targeting the local market.
Our goal is to drive sales and revenue as well as awareness for the millions of Small and Medium Enterprises in Nigeria.
With the new round of funding, the startup is looking to scale. The focus will go into product development and in improving sales execution.
An Abuja expansion is set to begin in August 2018 and soon, it will launch a new feature that allows SMEs run ads for as low as N25,000.
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