From the Driver's Seat: Where Gendayo Began

Before Gendayo was a platform, it was a pattern our founder Andrew Saka kept noticing from two very different driver's seats. In a conversation on Teds Show, a Swedish longform podcast, he traced how a taxi licence earned on the streets of Stockholm and a childhood spent between Sweden and Uganda turned into a mobility company for African cities.

Watch the full conversation (in Swedish). An English transcript is available here, or turn on auto-translated English subtitles in YouTube's settings.

Two seats, one problem

Most ride-hailing companies are founded by people who have studied the market. Gendayo started with someone who had lived inside it, from behind the wheel, on two continents that could not have been more different in how people move.

That difference is the whole story.

A taxi licence, earned the hard way

In his early twenties, Andrew earned his taxi driver's licence, the national badge to drive professionally anywhere in Sweden, back when it still demanded something of you. He learned his trade in Stockholm: months at taxi school, the city committed to memory, every street inside the tolls, how to move north, south, east and west without thinking about it.

GPS already existed, but it was new, and the test still expected you to carry the map in your head. He remembers feeling slightly foolish memorising street names he suspected a device would soon handle for him. He drove for the established firms of the day and learned the part of the job that has nothing to do with maps. How you treat a passenger. How to make someone feel safe in your car. How the whole thing holds together when the person driving takes it seriously.

It gave him something most app founders never have. He understood the trade from the inside, as the one doing the driving and earning the fare.

A different system, every summer

The other seat was thousands of kilometres away. Andrew was born in Uganda and spent his summers there growing up. Getting around did not mean a metered taxi. It meant the minibus, called the taxi in Uganda and the matatu in Kenya, the everyday workhorse of urban transport.

With one defining difference. No timetable.

He still describes the scene clearly. You stand at the roadside not knowing when you will leave, because departure is not set by a clock. It is set by the conductor, who pulls away only when he decides the bus is full enough to be worth his while. People bang on the side asking to go. The conductor waits anyway. Sometimes a passenger offers to pay for the empty seats just to get the thing moving.

Back in Sweden, a teenage Andrew could catch a bus to basketball practice that arrived exactly when the schedule promised. Same simple need, getting from one place to another, lived two completely different ways. That contrast never left him.

What the surface hides

Years later, ride-hailing reached African cities. Uber, Bolt and a handful of local apps now operate across the region. On the surface, they work.

The surface is the easy part.

What is harder to see is everything that only shows up once you have actually moved through these cities, by car and on foot, as a passenger and as a driver. The rhythms no dataset captures. The difference between a road that exists and a road that works. The quiet calculations a driver makes to get through a day. Platforms built somewhere else tend to arrive with the answers already written. Andrew's argument is that the answers worth having are the ones you can only learn on the ground.

That is what Gendayo is built around. Not a feature the big apps forgot, but a way of seeing the problem that does not travel well from another continent.

Built from Africa, for Africa

So Gendayo is being built from that point of view. AI-native, yes, but the technology is in service of something simpler: a ride that feels safe, smart and fair to the two people who matter most, the rider and the driver.

Fair means a driver can earn a living worth the hours, and a passenger pays a price that is honest, not a number invented on the spot for whoever looks new in town. Safe means both sides are known and accountable to each other, the way trust works when a platform takes it seriously rather than treating it as an afterthought. Smart means every trip teaches the system something, so the next ride is a little better than the last.

And it is not only about cars. In many of these cities the motorcycle, the boda-boda, is how people really move, and Gendayo is being built for that reality too.

How we do it stays with us for now. What we are building toward is no secret: a platform that earns trust because it was designed by someone who has sat on both sides of the trip.

Where things stand

Gendayo took shape inside the Antler incubator and is now in active research and validation across its first markets: Uganda, Kenya and Nigeria. A research team on the ground is gathering real input from riders and drivers, with an advisory board guiding the work. The priority right now is getting the foundations right before scaling. Building something that genuinely works in local conditions, not something that merely launches.

The throughline runs all the way back to those two driver's seats. One taught Andrew the craft and the customer. The other showed him a problem worth a company. Gendayo is the work of bringing them together: the discipline of a system that runs on time, built for the places that have been told to wait for it.

If you want to help shape what we build, the Mobility Assessment is open. Three minutes, and your input goes directly into how Gendayo works.

Take the Mobility Assessment →

Thanks to Ted and Teds Show for the conversation.