Why We Raised at All
Today, Stima raises its first outside capital: a €2.2M seed round led by Renew Capital. Here is the full story behind that decision. The prototype Stima ran in Nairobi for nine months was built on about €40,000 of my own savings. Three cooperatives were running the system. Battery failure rates were down. Operators were paying a small monthly fee to keep access, not because we asked them to, but because Samuel Wachira told the other managers it was worth it and they agreed. That early revenue wasn't enough to build the hardware and engineering team the next phase required.
The SEM-1 hardware module needs to be manufactured at volume — enough units to supply 20–30 fleet operators and prove the production process before we scale further. The ML models need more training data, which means instrumenting more vehicles and running more discharge cycles through the pipeline. The engineering team is currently one person (me) and two contractors. Scaling past 500 vehicles requires at least three full-time engineers who aren't context-switching between firmware, backend, and ML.
The €2.2M seed is specific: it funds two years of hardware manufacturing, team growth, and data expansion. It doesn't fund a pivot. The product direction is clear from the field work.
Why Renew Capital
We spoke with eight investors before choosing Renew Capital. The others were interested in the thesis but uncomfortable with the hardware component — investors who understand SaaS margins and IoT hardware in the same conversation are not common. Two were interested in a "software-only" version of Stima that licensed the analytics to existing telematics providers. We turned that down because the hardware is not separable from the value proposition: accurate battery modeling at low connectivity requires edge processing, and edge processing requires specific hardware.
Renew Capital's portfolio includes companies operating in 13 African countries across logistics, energy, and mobility. They've seen the infrastructure challenges we're designing around — not as a theory but as an operational reality in their existing investments. When we described the offline-first architecture and the generator charging problem, the Renew partner we met with said "yes, exactly" before we'd finished the sentence. That recognition matters more than it sounds.
Their network in East Africa is also genuinely useful. Two of our three pilot cooperatives were operating before this round. Renew has connections to larger fleet operators in Nairobi and Kampala who can give us access to 100+ vehicle deployments for the next phase of data collection. That's not just a financial relationship — it's infrastructure for the technical work.
What the €2.2M Unlocks
SEM-1 production run. The prototype module used off-the-shelf components assembled by hand. The production SEM-1 uses a custom PCB with an ARM Cortex-M4F MCU running at 120MHz, a Quectel EC21-AF modem (2G/3G/LTE Cat 1), a TI BQ76952 battery monitor IC that interfaces with the pack BMS directly, a 4MB external flash chip for the offline buffer, and conformal coating on the PCB for moisture and dust resistance. First production run is 500 units. Lead time from the Shenzhen contract manufacturer is 14 weeks from order placement.
Team expansion. We're hiring two firmware engineers — one with experience in embedded C for ARM Cortex-M, one with protocol expertise in OBD-II, CAN bus, and the various BMS communication protocols used by Tier-1 battery manufacturers in China. We're also hiring a data engineer who has worked with time-series telemetry at scale, ideally with QuestDB or InfluxDB production experience. If you're reading this and those descriptions sound like you, email jason@stimaboda.org.
Dataset expansion. The current degradation models are trained on 18,347 discharge cycles from African EV motorcycles. The performance is good enough for Nairobi and Lagos. It's not good enough for Jakarta or Dhaka, where the temperature profiles, vehicle models, and driving patterns are different. The seed budget includes instrumenting 150 vehicles in Southeast Asia over the next 12 months for training data collection. We're in conversations with two motorcycle taxi aggregators in Indonesia about a data-sharing arrangement.
Product completeness. Several features are in the roadmap but not yet built: automated pack provenance tracking (tracing a battery pack's full maintenance history across multiple vehicle assignments), carbon credit reporting (cooperatives that can document battery utilization efficiency may be eligible for offset credits under emerging African carbon market frameworks), and a partner API that lets fleet management software vendors integrate Stima data into their own dashboards. The partner API is the highest-priority item after hardware delivery.
A Note on Geographic Focus
We get asked regularly whether we plan to expand to European or North American EV markets. The short answer is not in the next 24 months. The long answer is that the problem we solve — battery health monitoring under infrastructure-variable conditions with cost-sensitive operators — is most acute in markets where grid stability and maintenance tooling infrastructure are still developing. European fleet operators have access to dealer service networks, OBD-II readers from established vendors, and telematics platforms that integrate natively with the major vehicle manufacturers. The monitoring gap is smaller.
Africa and Southeast Asia have the fastest-growing EV two-wheeler markets in the world. The fleet operators in those markets are making vehicle purchasing decisions now that will run for 5–7 years. Getting Stima's monitoring into those fleets at the beginning of the adoption curve is a better strategy than waiting until the market matures and competing against well-capitalized incumbents on features and price. We're building for the early majority before they need us, not the late majority after they've already settled on other solutions.
What Comes After the Seed
We're not thinking about Series A yet. The seed milestone is 500 deployed SEM-1 units across at least 10 fleet operators, with six months of continuous operation data showing measurable reduction in unplanned battery failures. If we hit that milestone on the timeline we're projecting — by Q3 2026 — we'll have a strong quantitative case for the next round.
If you operate an EV fleet in East or West Africa and want early access to the production SEM-1, get in touch through the contact page. We're prioritizing operators who are willing to share data and participate in a structured deployment program. In exchange, early access customers get hardware at cost and first priority for the partner API beta.
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