Africa’s expanding cities highlight a striking paradox: despite swift urban growth, public transport systems remain fragmented, unreliable and heavily dependent on cash.
In Morocco alone, more than 60% of daily commutes depend on informal modes such as taxis, buses and shared rides, leaving commuters struggling to coordinate multimodal journeys and make seamless payments across different operators.
This fragmentation, however, presents an opportunity: the rise of Mobility-as-a-Service (MaaS).
At the same time, fintech adoption is surging as digital payments become the norm, from mobile wallets to ride-hailing services.
Morocco sits at the intersection of these trends, where the convergence of mobility and financial technology is no longer theoretical.
It is becoming the critical infrastructure African cities need to unlock economic productivity and reduce congestion.
Enter Weego, a Casablanca-based startup positioning itself as Morocco’s first fully integrated mobility and fintech platform.
Founded in 2020 by Saad Jittou and Mor Niane, a Moroccan-Senegalese duo, the company serves as a one-stop shop for mobility, integrating buses, taxis and private transit into a single digital platform.
Currently operating in five Moroccan cities, Weego serves everyday commuters while also delivering business-to-business (B2B) solutions that help companies streamline employee transportation, reduce logistical costs and lower carbon emissions.
What sets Weego apart from traditional ride-hailing apps is its embedded fintech infrastructure.
By enabling digital payments across all transport modes, the platform transforms cash-heavy informal transit into a more transparent and efficient ecosystem.
Connecting Africa Associate Editor Matshepo Sehloho spoke to Jittou, who is also the Weego CEO, to gain more insights into the company’s work.
Matshepo Sehloho (MS): What problem in Morocco’s mobility ecosystem inspired you to launch Weego?
Saad Jittou (SJ): Morocco’s cities were experiencing rapid growth in transport infrastructure, new bus lines, tramways, private operators, yet users were more lost than ever.
The problem wasn’t a lack of options; it was the complete fragmentation of those options. No reliable real-time information, no unified way to pay, no single interface to plan a trip across modes.
At the same time, Morocco was preparing for major milestones including the 2030 FIFA World Cup that would require cities to manage unprecedented passenger flows.
We saw a clear gap, the physical infrastructure was being built, but the digital layer connecting it all simply didn’t exist. Weego was built to be that layer.
MS: Can you walk us through the early days, what did version one of Weego look like?
SJ: Version one was very humble, deliberately so. It was built specifically for Dakar, [Senegal] covering just two operators, lines, stops and timetables.
Nothing more, clean, simple and honestly quite limited, but it was the right starting point, solve one thing well, in one city, before you try to go anywhere else.
The first real friction came quickly, users didn’t just want to know which bus to take, they wanted to see where the bus was. That sounds like a basic expectation today, but in our context, it was a significant technical problem.
Operators didn’t have reliable onboard GPS. So, we had a choice, either accept the limitation, or build something that could work around it. We chose to build. That’s when we started developing our predictive positioning engine, combining historical patterns, available signals, and behavioral data to infer real-time positions.
This was well before the current wave of generative AI (GenAI), and it ended up becoming one of the most important technical assets we have today.
Then came Covid; from one day to the next, public transport in Dakar and Casablanca essentially ceased to exist.
For a company whose entire product was built around public transit, that was an existential shock. It forced us to adapt fast and it’s what led us to develop Weegolines, our corporate mobility offering, which emerged directly from companies needing to move essential workers when public transport was unavailable.
So, as brutal as the crisis was, it also unlocked a business line we hadn’t originally planned for.
MS: What personal or professional experiences shaped your approach to building this company?
SJ: The most honest answer is that we built Weego because we lived with the problem ourselves. Endless waits at bus stops with no idea when the next one was coming.
Cities full of transport options that were somehow still impossible to navigate efficiently. The daily friction of needing exact change, arguing with a driver over a few coins.
These weren’t abstract user stories we read in a research report. They were things we experienced, that our parents experienced, that our siblings and friends experienced.
When you carry a problem that deep, the product you build isn’t just a technical response. It becomes something more personal, a statement that this is not acceptable, and that it can be fixed.
The founding partnership itself came together in an almost improbable way. In 2019, I went to Dakar to visit a Moroccan friend studying medicine there. During that trip, sitting in a café, I came across a magazine article about a group of engineers working on a mobility solution for the city.
I found [Mor Niane] on LinkedIn, and reached out cold. We met once, then again, and something clicked immediately. Our cities had the same problems. We had the same vision for what a solution should look like.
We were roughly the same age, which meant we’d grown up with the same frustrations at the same time. From that first conversation, we spoke every day.
He brought me into the team, which at the time was himself and three other engineers. That was 2019, and we haven’t stopped since.
MS: Why Morocco, and why now, for a mobility startup?
SJ: Morocco is going through something quite interesting: the government is actively building out public transport infrastructure in cities that have never had it before. Dozens of new bus networks, new operators coming in, whole cities being connected for the first time. That’s not something you see often, and it’s creating a very specific window for what we do.
Then there’s 2030. The World Cup co-hosted with Spain and Portugal is a hard deadline that every Moroccan city is now working backwards from. Benslimane will host the world’s largest stadium. We launched there in May 2026, four years out, because that’s the reality of building mobility infrastructure. You can’t start six months before the tournament and expect anything to work.
But honestly, the World Cup is more of an accelerant than a reason. The underlying need was already there. Moroccan cities were growing faster than their transport systems could handle, and the digital layer simply didn’t exist. No reliable real-time information, no unified payment, no way to plan a trip across modes. That gap was the reason we came to Morocco in the first place.
Morocco makes sense as a base beyond just the domestic market. The urban transport problems you see here, fragmented operators, cash dependency, no passenger information, you see them across North Africa and the continent.
The difference is that here, there’s now a national push to fix them. That creates momentum you can build on.
MS: How does Weego differentiate itself from existing ride-hailing or transport solutions in Morocco?
SJ: First thing worth clarifying: we’re not a ride-hailing company.
We don’t own vehicles, we don’t employ drivers, we don’t compete with anyone for passengers. We integrate everyone. Whatever transport exists in a city – bus, tram, train, taxi, ride-hailing, ferries, carpooling, micro-mobility – it ends up on Weego. The user doesn’t need to know which operator runs which line. They just need to get somewhere.
That’s a very different proposition from what’s out there today. Ride-hailing apps serve one mode. Operator apps, where they even exist, serve one network and global tools like Google Maps work beautifully in cities where structured, reliable data is available.
In most African cities, it isn’t, the data is fragmented, inconsistent, or simply missing. That’s not a problem Google is going to solve for Casablanca or Dakar anytime soon, because their model depends on infrastructure that doesn’t exist here yet.
So, we built our own, our real-time positioning engine doesn’t rely on operators having perfect GPS coverage. It uses machine learning to predict where a bus is based on historical patterns, available signals, and user behavior.
That took years to get right, but it’s what allows us to deliver a reliable experience where others can’t.
On the operator side, we made a deliberate choice to be easy to work with. Free integration, a short onboarding timeline, commissions that reflect the thin margins of public transport.
We’re not extracting value from operators. We’re helping them digitize in a way that actually works for their economics. That matters a lot in a sector where trust between tech companies and traditional operators is not always a given.
MS: What core user pain points are you solving today?
SJ: Three pain points dominate, first, the information gap: users don’t know when the next bus/tram is coming, which route to take, or how long a journey will realistically take.
Secondly, the payment friction: Morocco still has significant cash dependency in transport, which slows boarding, creates change problems, and excludes certain user profiles.
Thirdly, the access gap: users with disabilities, limited mobility, or low digital literacy need solutions designed for them, not as an afterthought.
We address all three, real-time passenger information, digital ticketing and subscription management, and an interface built for simplicity.
The numbers speak for themselves: in Kenitra, we now have over 100,000 monthly active users who open the app an average of seven times a day. That frequency tells you the app has genuinely become part of daily life.
MS: How else are you leveraging AI, data analytics, or routing optimization in your platform?
SJ: We use AI on several levels, and the most critical one is real-time positioning. In our markets, you can’t simply rely on operator GPS data. It’s often incomplete, inconsistent, or entirely absent.
So, we built a proprietary machine learning engine that combines whatever GPS signals are available with historical patterns, user behavior data, and predictive modeling to generate reliable real-time positions even when the underlying infrastructure is imperfect.
This was developed well before the current wave of GenAI, and it remains one of our most significant technical assets.
The second layer is demand analytics. Most operators in our markets have never had access to structured passenger flow data: where people are traveling, at what times, along which corridors.
We give them that visibility. It’s genuinely useful for network planning, not just as a reporting tool but as an input for decisions about where to add capacity, when to adjust frequency, and how to reduce dead mileage.
Routing optimization is the third active area: helping users plan multimodal trips that aren’t just theoretically possible but practically reliable given real-world constraints like traffic, delays, and connection times.
Increasingly, the transaction data we’re accumulating creates a fourth layer: behavioral and financial patterns that will eventually support credit scoring, insurance pricing, and other financial services for operators and users. The AI and data work we’re doing today is laying that foundation.
_(1).jpg "Weego Team on stage at an event.")
The Weego founders have created a one-stop shop integrating buses, taxis, and private transit into a single, seamless digital platform. (Source: Weego)
Merging fintech and mobility
MS: At what point did you decide Weego would incorporate fintech features, beyond mobility?
SJ: Honestly, we never thought of it as a fintech decision, that framing came later, from the outside. From the inside, it was always just: the payment problem is part of the transport problem, so it has to be part of the solution.
From day one, we saw how much friction cash created across the entire transport chain. A passenger scrambling for exact change. A driver managing a cash float while trying to keep to schedule. An operator with no visibility into daily revenues, exposed to leakage and fraud at every step. These weren’t peripheral issues. They were structural failures baked into how public transport operated.
Ignoring them would have meant building a product that improved the information experience while leaving the transaction experience completely broken.
So, we structured Weego around two core modules from the start. The first is the multimodal hub: real-time positions, route search, trip management, passenger information across all modes.
The second is the Weego payment system: a rechargeable wallet that users can top up by bank card or cash through partners like Cash Plus, and use to buy tickets, renew bus or tram subscriptions, recharge prepaid operator cards, book a ride-hailing service, or pay for a taxi. One wallet, every mode.
That transaction layer also happens to be how we generate revenue on the consumer side, through commissions on each transaction. But, that was a consequence of the design, not the motivation for it.
Today we don’t really think of mobility and fintech as two separate things. They’re a single response to a single problem. The separation is an analyst’s distinction, not a product reality.
MS: Do you see Weego evolving into a broader ‘super app’ for financial services?
SJ: The super app question is one we think about carefully, because the term means very different things depending on where you are. WeChat and Grab are both called super apps, but they’re fundamentally different animals built for very different contexts.
So, the question isn’t really “will Weego become a super app” but rather “what kind of super app would make sense for our market and our mission?”
The honest answer is that our ambition is to become a mobility super app. Not a general-purpose platform that does everything, but the definitive entry point for anything related to moving around a city.
We’re already in the early stages of that: integrating every available mode of transport, public and private, into a single interface.
Buses, trams, trains, taxis, ride-hailing, carpooling, intercity coaches, micro-mobility. The vision is that no matter how you want to get somewhere, Weego is where you start.
From there, the ecosystem naturally expands. Solutions for drivers, insurance products tied to mobility, family mobility packs, corporate transport bundles, tools for transit agents and operators.
There’s a lot of surface area to grow into, all of it gravitating around the core of moving people.
What we’ve consciously ruled out is anything that takes us into moving goods.
Delivery is a cousin of what we do, and the two worlds look similar from the outside. But they’re genuinely different businesses with different operators, different economics, and different user relationships. We’ve chosen our battle. It’s people, not parcels.
MS: How central is fintech to your long-term revenue strategy?
SJ: The transactional layer isn’t a feature we added to the product. It’s one of the two pillars the entire business is built on.
Long-term, it’s the one that changes everything, because it scales in a way that nothing else does.
Our model is built on commission, with zero upfront cost for operators. No heavy equipment purchase, no complex infrastructure to maintain. We handle the integration, absorb that cost, and take a percentage of every digital transaction we process.
For public transport operators, that sits between 4% and 5% depending on volume. For private operators like ride-hailing or carpooling, it ranges from 15% to 20%, reflecting the different economics of those businesses.
We’ve kept public transport commissions deliberately low because we understand the margins are thin and the mission is infrastructure, not profit extraction.
Right now the revenue mix runs roughly eighty-twenty in favor of B2B, meaning Weegolines, our corporate mobility offering. That imbalance is intentional and honestly partly born out of necessity.
The Covid period pushed us to find recurring revenue fast, and B2B contracts gave us exactly that: stable, growing monthly revenue that allowed us to build the team, invest in the product, and keep our heads above water while the business-to-consumer (B2C) side matured.
For an African B2C startup without the luxury of overspending on user acquisition, having that B2B foundation wasn’t a compromise. It was what made everything else possible.
But the direction is clearly inverting. As we launch more cities with the transactional model, B2C volume starts to do what B2B never can: scale indefinitely.
Every new city means new operators, new modal share to digitize, new transaction volume. Buses, trams, trains, taxis, ferries. The same model works across all of them. That’s the long game, and it’s the one we’re increasingly in a position to play.
MS: What payment methods are currently integrated and how do users respond to each?
SJ: Today we have two ways to load the Weego wallet. The first is a direct bank card top-up: the user transfers funds from their account to their Weego balance, straightforward and instant.
The second is cash top-up through our partner Cash Plus, which is the market leader in Morocco for physical cash transfer points. They have an extensive distribution network across the country, which means a user can walk into a nearby Cash Plus location, hand over cash, and have it credited to their Weego wallet.
Once the balance is there, it works across every transport mode we support tickets, subscriptions, prepaid card reloads, private transport.
The finding that genuinely surprised us was around mobile money. We expected it to be a meaningful top-up channel, given how embedded it is in African mobility markets. In Dakar, for instance, mobile money is the default.
But in Morocco, the response has been almost nonexistent. Users here simply don’t gravitate toward mobile money solutions, even though several telecom operators offer them. The banking penetration is higher, and the cultural relationship with financial tools is different. People trust their bank card or they trust Cash Plus. Mobile money sits in between and hasn’t found its moment here yet.
That divergence is an important lesson for how we think about expanding across markets. The product architecture can be the same, but the payment preferences are shaped by local context in ways you can’t assume in advance. You must observe and adapt.
MS: How are you addressing Morocco’s mix of cash-heavy and increasingly digital transactions?
SJ: Cash remains the dominant reality in Moroccan urban transport, and pretending otherwise would mean designing a product for a minority of users while ignoring everyone else. Our philosophy has always been progressive migration, not forced adoption.
Concretely, that means building bridges. Through our partnership with Cash Plus, users who have never held a bank card can load their Weego wallet at any of thousands of physical points across the country and then use it digitally from there. The first step doesn’t require abandoning cash. It just converts it into a digital balance that works everywhere on the network.
On the operator side, we’re equipping partners with smart POS systems that digitize the transaction trail even when the underlying payment is cash. So even for the users who remain firmly in the cash economy, the system is capturing data, reducing fraud exposure, and giving operators the visibility they’ve never had before.
Subscription management and ticket renewal are fully digital. The rechargeable transport card can be topped up remotely. Every feature we build is designed to make the digital path slightly easier than the cash alternative, without creating a hard wall for those who aren’t ready to cross over yet.
The transition is happening, but it has to happen on users’ terms. Our job is to make digital the obvious choice, not the only choice.
