Strive Masiyiwa: Vaya Now Has Over 20 000 Registered Vehicles

Back in October Cassava Smartech launched their ride-hailing application Vaya. Over the past seven months, they have managed to register 20 000 cars since the launch.

The details were revealed by Strive Masiyiwa in a Facebook post a few hours ago. The CEO of Econet Global believes that if Cassava had acquired the cars themselves they would have used over $300 million.

What Uber (and now we) realized was that you can partner with owners of vehicles, who will use their own assets (in this case, cars) to provide the service.

Uber has almost 4m cars on its platform. The cost of so many cars would be over $60bn if Uber had to buy them! This would obviously been totally prohibitive for any #StartUp.

Vaya now has 20,000 vehicles (after 6 months). That would have cost us over $300m just to purchase vehicles… This would have been totally prohibitive for us, too!

Strive Masiyiwa – CEO Econet Global

Strive also shared some interesting details regarding the Vaya service:

• Cassava has recruited 10x private contractors (franchisees) and we have assigned them each an area of the city of Harare (franchise area).
• Now we have begun to equip them with resources to collect waste from homes and businesses.
• In this model, we provide each franchisee with access to vehicles (using the Vaya Truck platform).
• We are using our #process# to ramp up these small companies so that they can handle 1m homes within three months, something they could not do on their own!