Urban mobility in African cities is not simply an infrastructure problem. It is an information problem, a coordination problem, and increasingly a data problem — one that sits at the intersection of formal public transit, informal operators, and private services that have never been designed to speak to each other. A passenger in Dakar who wants to cross the city may have more transport options today than a decade ago, but less clarity about how to use them. The BRT runs one route. The bus dakar runs another. Taxis fill the gaps. And no single system tells you when any of them is coming, which one to take, or how to pay without cash. Weego, founded in 2020 by Saad Jittou and Papa Mor Niane, is building the digital layer to connect all of it.
The Moroccan-Senegalese startup operates a mobility-as-a-service platform that aggregates public transit, private ride-hailing, and informal transport into a single app — allowing users to plan, track, and eventually pay for multi-modal journeys in real time. A parallel B2B unit, Weego Line, handles corporate staff transportation for businesses whose employees still need to commute when public options fall short.
In March 2026, Weego raised $1.1 million from Azur Innovation Fund, an early-stage venture capital firm, to expand across Moroccan cities, strengthen its enterprise transport solutions, and prepare for growth into Africa, Europe, and the Middle East. The timing is deliberate: Morocco co-hosts the 2030 FIFA World Cup, and the country is investing heavily in public transit infrastructure ahead of that deadline.
Launch Base Africa’s Charles Rapulu Udoh sat down with co-founder Papa Mor Niane to discuss the founding story, the complexity of integrating informal transport, the regulatory dynamics across Morocco and Senegal, and what comes after 2030.
Launch Base Africa: Thanks for joining the chat, Mor. Last March, Weego raised funding from investors with high expectations. Let’s go back to when you founded Weego. In Morocco, many focus on the informal sector or B2B e‑commerce. What drew you to mobility? Was there a specific moment that inspired that route?
Papa Mor Niane: Thanks for having me. The founding story really came from personal experience. Back in university, the challenge we faced with mobility — especially public transportation — was that you simply couldn’t rely on it for every trip. I remember going to university in Dakar, Senegal. There was no proper real‑time information about public transit. If you needed to take a bus, you had no idea when it would come. If you were headed somewhere you’d never been, you often didn’t even know which bus to take. On top of that, our cities are trying to improve infrastructure, including transport. In Dakar, for example, we now have a new train, the BRT, on top of the formal and informal options we used to have. So the supply of mobility options has grown, but the fragmentation has actually deepened. And there is still no unified source of information to help passengers move efficiently in a way that suits their needs. That’s what triggered our response. We were young computer science engineers, and the first thing engineers like to do when they finish school is see if they can solve a real problem the community faces. That’s how the idea started to take shape.
Launch Base Africa: From a fragmentation standpoint, you have buses, taxis, moto‑taxis and private operators that don’t communicate. Is the core problem a technology gap, or a coordination failure between operators with no commercial incentive to integrate?
Papa Mor Niane: It’s both. On the technology side, we are trying to tackle two main aspects. The first is information — providing reliable, real‑time information across every transport option, quickly and in a way that suits users. The second is transactions. Our economies in Africa are still heavily cash‑based, and we think that’s a bottleneck to seamless movement. So technology is our answer to those two issues. But the other part is definitely an orchestration and organizational gap that needs to be filled by the authorities. For that, we try to help by bringing demand‑side and supply‑side data, so cities and transport authorities can make the best decisions for their networks
Launch Base Africa: Weego promises real‑time tracking and cross‑mode journey planning. But GPS coverage, operator data‑sharing, and mobile connectivity are inconsistent across cities. How do you maintain reliability of that real‑time layer when the underlying infrastructure isn’t always reliable?
Papa Mor Niane: That’s definitely a challenge. Even some global players, like Citymapper or Google Maps, struggle in Africa because the data simply isn’t there yet. So we took a different approach. We didn’t want to rely solely on GPS units on buses operated by transport companies. We brought in algorithms and artificial intelligence, especially to predict vehicle positions. Whenever we have the opportunity to work with a partner who is already somewhat organised — and public transit is getting better every year — if they have GPS, we integrate that data and feed it into our algorithm. We then combine that with our user base to deliver real‑time information and predictions.
Launch Base Africa: In Morocco and Senegal, we’ve seen traditional transport models clash with new technology players, with governments responding through disruptive regulations. How do you manage that regulatory tension? And given your position, could you become a gatekeeper that excludes informal transport workers or enables excessive data concentration?
Papa Mor Niane: Our case is a bit different because we are not bringing anything truly disruptive from a regulatory standpoint. We aim to be a layer between the user and all the different options they have — whether formal public transit, informal transport, or private ride‑hailing services. We are simply bringing them together on a single platform so users can move around the city with peace of mind, accessing information and, eventually, making transactions. We’re not doing anything against the regulations that govern each specific service. On the data side, the data we process is essentially public data. Public transit information ought to be public. In most of our countries, it is public in principle; the problem is that it’s not available because the systems aren’t in place, especially with informal operators. We position ourselves as a partner to cities and transport authorities, helping them even support informal operators by providing tools that allow them to work in a more productive and structured way.
Launch Base Africa: There have been data breaches in countries like Algeria and Morocco. Do you have safeguards to protect this highly sensitive data?
Papa Mor Niane: It’s a risk everyone faces nowadays, especially with the development of new AI models. From day one, we anonymise every data point related to passengers — that’s the most sensitive part. Data about the service itself should be public. Passengers should be able to know when the next train, tram, or bus is coming. That’s not a security or regulation issue; it’s simply a matter of having the infrastructure ready. For our customer‑facing service, everything is anonymised from the start, so nobody is at risk from that kind of breach.
Launch Base Africa: The informal sector moves the majority of urban Africans at a fraction of the cost of formal systems. You’re also targeting formal networks. How do you bring informality onto the platform without disrupting the livelihoods that depend on it? How do you reconcile informality and formality in the long run?
Papa Mor Niane: Cities are, as I said, improving their networks and systems. In both Morocco and Senegal, I believe informality will become less and less present over time — that’s our vision and what we are seeing. New modes of transport being added by governments or private entities will disrupt traditional informal services. But for now, our goal is not to exclude them from our solution. We provide information about everything they offer. If you want to move from point A to point B in Senegal, we’ll show you all available options, including the informal ones when they serve those needs. On the payment side, we are providing informal operators with ways to receive digital payments, so they can serve more types of users. So the aim is to include that part of African transport, while keeping in mind that informality will gradually recede. We saw that in Morocco over the last decade: a rapid transformation where you hardly see any informal transport in cities anymore, even though it used to exist. Other countries, especially in West Africa, are heading in that same direction.
Launch Base Africa: Morocco will co‑host the World Cup in just over five years. Is that a genuine product milestone for Weego, and what happens to the business in 2031 when that urgency fades?
Papa Mor Niane: Great question. In fact, we just launched in the city that will host the biggest stadium — the Grand Stade Hassan II, currently under construction — the city of Benslimane. We’ve rolled out our solution there. We’re very excited about the World Cup because it will be a major step for the country and for its infrastructure, especially transport. Huge numbers of people will come for the games and to visit other cities. They’ll need a proper way to move around, access information, and pay smoothly for a good experience. We are preparing every aspect of that, in partnership with transport operators in the host cities. But for us, the World Cup isn’t the final destination. We’re not here only for mega‑events; we want to serve the daily lives of the community. After 2030, we’ll simply keep improving, keep growing in new cities, and give more people back the time they used to waste at bus stops, tram stops, or asking around about which route to take. The question for us will be: did we handle the huge influx of users well, and can we keep improving and expanding access to that solution for even more people?
Launch Base Africa: You’ve mentioned Europe and the Middle East. What’s the next logical move? In the short and long term, are you looking at Francophone West Africa, or acquiring other startups?
Papa Mor Niane: In the short term, the main goal is consolidation, especially in Morocco. The advantage Weego has is that our business model revolves around cities within a country. That gives us more room to scale, because each city can be a distinct milestone — each has its own transport options and ways of doing things. You can’t just scale country by country; it’s more city by city. In Morocco, the Road to 2030 plan includes a massive upgrade of public transit infrastructure. Many small and medium‑sized cities are getting proper bus operators for the first time. So we’re focused on that — it’s already a huge market and workload for us. In the medium term, the goal is to scale across Africa, especially West Africa. That market is deep and largely unserved; we don’t really have direct competitors there yet. But the problem we’re tackling is global. Every city with public transport faces the same fragmentation, lack of information, and lack of seamless payment. So wherever the opportunity arises — and we have operators ready to partner with us — we’ll go. The roadmap: first consolidate Moroccan cities to prepare the country for the World Cup, launch in several West African cities, and then the rest of the continent and the Middle East. We’re not actively pursuing opportunities in Europe or elsewhere for now.
Launch Base Africa: Many mobility startups (such as SWVL) in Africa have mostly pivoted from B2C to B2B. Weego seems to straddle both. Which side is more relevant to your growth, and where does the commercial gravity pull?
Papa Mor Niane: We learned from the experience of players like Swvl. They started as a B2C shuttle service, an alternative or complement to public transit, and after their IPO faced challenges and shifted to B2B. Our story is a bit different. We launched the app gathering all transport options around 2020, in Senegal and Casablanca, but COVID hit. There was no public transit to use, and the app wasn’t relevant during the confinement. That forced us to open our eyes to a B2B segment with a similar problem: staff transportation. Even though many people were locked down, essential workers still needed to get to work. So we launched a new business unit called Weego Line — a staff transportation service that helps employees commute from home to work and back. You can see it as one of the private options within our multi‑modal app, operated by us. That B2B segment helped us gain the traction and revenue we needed to reach the next stage. Today the B2B unit is just a complementary business line that can bring extra revenue and a different business model.
Launch Base Africa: As a unification layer, you aggregate users and data. Operators might eventually see you as a threat to their direct customer relationship. How do you keep partners from trying to replicate what you’ve built and cut you out?
Papa Mor Niane: They don’t see us as a threat. They actually find peace of mind in working with us, because public transit is a tough sector. Organising it and having resources to run it properly is not easy. Most operators don’t even have a customer service function. Partnering with Weego means we sit in front of users, intercept feedback, gather it, and pass it on — a benefit they didn’t have before. The partnership is healthy. We’re not doing the operators’ core job. We position ourselves as a support layer facing the user, and we bring operators data about their customers so they can improve.
Launch Base Africa: You are from Senegal and your co‑founder is from Morocco. That’s rare in Africa. How does that dynamic work in practice?
Papa Mor Niane: The dynamic is, first of all, built on a personal relationship. My co‑founder and I met because he came to Senegal in 2019 to visit a friend — there are many Moroccans at the medical university in Senegal and vice versa. He saw an article in a car shop magazine about some engineers working to improve public transit, so he contacted me. From our first conversation, we saw that our vision aligned, and our values matched. It was a no‑brainer to explore building something together. We started talking every day and we’ve never stopped. The dynamic is very smooth and simple, rooted in a deep mission: as members of these communities and countries, we want to improve what we can. We chose public transit because it’s crucial for every country and every person — transportation is how people access opportunity.
Launch Base Africa: How does your actual corporate governance structure work, given it started from a strong personal friendship?
Papa Mor Niane: We have a clear structure. We are co‑founders, we have investors on the cap table, and we’re both on the cap table. Operationally, he is the CEO, handling fundraising, partnerships, administration, and finance. I handle product, acquisition, growth, and customer support. We’ve separated responsibilities based on where each of us is most effective, and we have a very good team around us.
Launch Base Africa: You work with many partners, including municipal authorities. What do those commercial agreements look like, and how long do they take to close? Do you have similar partnerships in Senegal?
Papa Mor Niane: Our model for partnering with authorities is very simple. When it comes to cities and transport regulators, the partnership isn’t commercial — we don’t ask them for money or compensation. We simply want to help them improve the quality of transport services in their city. So we reach an agreement to provide them with data and information layers they can use for better planning. In return, they help us with introductions to the actual transport operators, which leads to commercial partnerships. For those operators, the commercial agreement is equally straightforward: they pay nothing upfront to integrate with Weego. Our business model is a small commission on any transactions processed through the app. As simple as that. Integration typically takes one to two weeks if they have a solid setup.
Launch Base Africa: Looking back on your journey so far, what’s the most important lesson you’ve learned about building a startup in Africa, and what would you say to other founders just starting out?
Papa Mor Niane: I’ve learned that timing is often more critical than we can even imagine. In my experience, resilience is simply the fuel that keeps us focused on the continuous improvement needed to serve our markets and customers well. I also feel that building relationships based on shared goals can really help a project move forward, it is something our ecosystems seem to thrive on.
If I were to offer any small advice to fellow founders, it would be to keep building heart-centered solutions that address the real problems impacting our economies and daily lives. If you can arm yourself with patience, resilience, and a bit of humility, you can truly find a way to thrive. Most importantly, I try to stay obsessed with our users, they are the constant that ensures we are ready whenever that perfect timing strikes.