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  • Moove raised $250 million in a Series C round led by Mubadala, reaching a $2.1 billion valuation.
  • The money funds autonomous vehicle fleets, robotics-first Nests depots, and new city launches.
  • Moove runs about 42,000 vehicles across 29 cities and manages autonomous fleets for Waymo in Phoenix and Miami.
  • The company plans to grow its autonomous workforce from about 150 to about 500 by year end.

Mubadala’s $250 million investment now anchors Moove, the mobility company building the operating layer for driverless transport. The Series C round it led values the firm at $2.1 billion. Woven Capital, Toyota’s Growth Fund, and Ion Pacific co-led it. For the UAE, the deal ties a sovereign backer to a company that wants to run the fleets behind self-driving cars.

The money follows a clear plan. Moove will expand its autonomous vehicle business, own more fleets, and build robotics-first depots it calls Nests. These sites charge, service, and maintain driverless cars around the clock. Fresh capital will also open new markets. Mubadala’s $250 million investment gives the company the balance sheet to move faster. The company announced today, 5th of August, the investment and the company’s vision of the company further.

Inside Mubadala’s $250 million investment

BlueCrest Capital Management, Sona Asset Management, and The Raptor Group came in as new backers. They sit alongside earlier investors such as BlackRock, MUFG, Franklin Templeton, and Uber. The Moove Series C funding builds on a stake Mubadala first took three years ago. Ali Eid AlMheiri, Executive Director of Diversified Assets at Mubadala’s UAE Investments Platform, said the fund backs scalable platforms that support economic diversification and strengthen the country’s role as a hub for advanced technologies.

Ali Eid AlMheiri, Executive Director of Diversified Assets, UAE Investments Platform at Mubadala, said: “Mubadala is investing in enabling infrastructure and scalable platforms like Moove that support economic diversification and strengthen the UAE’s role as a hub for advanced technologies. Since Mubadala’s initial investment three years ago, Moove has been a great partner, and we are glad to continue partnering with Moove in its next phase of growth.”

What does that mean for you? Mubadala’s $250 million investment places public capital behind a bet on autonomous mobility. If the bet pays off, the UAE gains a stake in how driverless transport scales worldwide.

The Waymo fleet partnership

Moove already runs cars for Waymo. Its Waymo fleet partnership covers live operations in Phoenix and Miami, with London named as the first step abroad. Self-driving firms write the software. Moove handles the work they would rather avoid, the cleaning, charging, and repair of every vehicle. That split lets each side focus on what it does best. Moove is also Uber’s largest global fleet partner, which widens its reach across the ride-hail market.

The autonomous vehicle fleet business carries real risk. Owning cars in an unsettled market ties up capital for years. Moove is betting its operating skill will hold that risk steady as fleets grow.

From Lagos to a $2.1 billion valuation

Ladi Delano and Jide Odunsi started Moove in 2020 with 76 cars in Lagos. The company now runs about 42,000 vehicles across 29 cities in 13 countries and reports $420 million in annual recurring revenue. It employs 3,300 people and has grown through deals such as Kovi in Brazil and Tokyo Taxi in Japan. The Moove $2.1 billion valuation shows how far that base has stretched.

Ladi Delano, Co-Founder, Co-CEO and Advisory Board Chairman of Moove, said: “Every major technology revolution becomes an infrastructure race. The internet required data centres. AI required compute. Autonomy requires fleets, charging, maintenance, data systems and 24/7 operations in every city – and that is what Moove is building. In our view, as autonomy scales, infrastructure ownership and operations will define the category leaders. We are building to be one of them. 

From our anchor in the UAE, and backed by long-term strategic capital, Moove now has the platform to help take autonomy from breakthrough technology to everyday transportation. This is not a departure from our mission; it is the fullest expression of it.”

What comes next

Hiring tells the story. Moove plans to grow its autonomous workforce from about 150 people to about 500 by the end of the year, a rise of more than 220%. That pace shows where the company sees demand. Mubadala’s $250 million investment signals the same view: that owning and running fleets will decide who leads.

Autonomous mobility is expected to shape logistics, public transport, and city planning over the coming years, though the timeline stays uncertain. For riders and investors, the message is plain. The firms that own and run driverless fleets may matter as much as the ones writing the code.

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6G band in the UAE

The case for the 6G band in the UAE rests on a small number: two to five percent. That is how far an Upper 6 GHz signal falls behind today’s 3.5 GHz C-band in reach. The modelling covered city centres, towns, suburbs and open country. Higher frequencies normally travel less far, and shorter reach normally means more towers. A gap this narrow points the other way. An operator can hang the new radios on masts and rooftops it already owns.

The figure comes from a white paper titled “The Golden 6 GHz Band.” Four names sit on it: TDRA, the telecoms regulator, e& UAE, Khalifa University of Science and Technology, and NYU Abu Dhabi. Its release comes with a decision to move the 6G band in the UAE out of trials and into commercial service. The industry calls it the golden spectrum.

Where the threefold figure comes from

Two gains sit behind the headline claim, and they multiply. The first is a gain in spectral efficiency of about 1.5 times. It comes from a 256TRX Giga-MIMO antenna array, which has far more transmit and receive paths than a standard 5G unit. Beamforming and scheduling across the array do the rest. This gain holds regardless of the channel width. The second is width itself. Set 200 MHz of Upper 6 GHz spectrum against a 100 MHz C-band carrier and the channel doubles. One and a half times two comes to roughly triple the capacity per cell. The authors say the result lines up with work by independent analysts.

Coverage comes out of the same hardware. Signals at higher frequencies lose strength faster, and the array’s beamforming makes up for the loss. In the hardest case the team modelled, indoors in a dense city, reach stays within about three percent of C-band.

A caveat travels with every figure. The results come from models, not field tests, and rest on assumptions the paper lists. Live performance, it says, will depend on where the radios go, which spectrum they get and what the devices can do. Bayan Sharif, provost of Khalifa University, called the 1.5 times gain “achievable under well-conditioned assumptions.” The method went out with the findings, he said, so others could check the work.

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  • Meta reports more than 15 million subscriptions and trials worldwide, with Edits and AI glasses features still to come.

How regulation shaped the 6G band in the UAE

Policy moved before engineering on the 6G band in the UAE. In 2023, the World Radiocommunication Conference identified 6425 to 7125 MHz for mobile service across ITU Region 1. The Telecommunications and Digital Government Regulatory Authority (TDRA) moved earlier than most of its peers and wrote the whole range into its national frequency plan. Within it, e& UAE holds 6425 to 6775 MHz, as much as 350 MHz in one unbroken block.

With the allocation settled, the operator committed to a commercial Giga-MIMO deployment built for peak downloads of 10 Gbps. Launch is planned between July and December 2026. Tariq Al Awadhi, TDRA’s executive director of spectrum affairs, drew the line himself: “Regulatory certainty is what turns research into infrastructure.”

Money follows the coverage result. The white paper treats Upper 6 GHz as a capacity layer laid over e& UAE’s current 5.5G network. It shares towers, rooftops, power and transport links, and backhaul gets an upgrade where needed. Fewer new sites can mean a lower cost for each bit carried as demand grows. Marwan Bin Shakar, chief technology officer at e& UAE, framed the customer side as higher speeds, more capacity and a steadier connection in crowded areas.

What the network is meant to carry

The paper groups planned uses under three headings: Connect Home, Connect Industry, and Connect Consumer and Vehicle. Those cover home broadband delivered over the air at speeds close to fibre, heavy-bandwidth uses for companies and public bodies, AI-driven services in the home, and connected cars.

The work extends earlier UAE research, including TDRA’s national 6G roadmap and two e& UAE papers written with the same universities. TDRA has described the band as a resource for 5G-Advanced services and a foundation for 6G. Abroad, over 60 companies, from operators and vendors to chipset suppliers and device makers, have signed a GSMA statement on the band’s readiness.

One piece sits beyond any operator’s control. A band is only useful to people whose phones and routers can tune to it. TDRA plans to add Upper 6 GHz, known in standards as n104, to national type-approval rules, with the first devices due from September 2026. How fast those handsets reach shop shelves will decide when the 6G band in the UAE turns from a modelled result into something a customer can measure.

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