When people talk about robotaxis, they talk about the software. Who has the better algorithm, whose car stops at red lights more reliably, who counts the most accident-free kilometres. Rarely does anyone ask the far duller and far more important question: who is going to wash that vehicle when it comes back to the depot?

A company founded in Nigeria in 2020, now headquartered in Dubai, decided that was precisely the business to be in. Moove raised 250 million dollars (around 230 million euros) at a valuation of 2.1 billion dollars. The round is led by Mubadala Investment Company from Abu Dhabi, with BlackRock, MUFG, Franklin Templeton and Uber among the investors.

Moove did not start as an autonomous vehicle company. It started by financing cars for drivers with no access to credit - people who want to drive a taxi but have nothing to buy a car with. Today it owns and manages a fleet of 42,000 vehicles in 14 countries and employs 3,300 people. That is a business no investor calls innovative, and it brings in money every month.

Founder Ladi Delano says that when they analysed the autonomous vehicle industry, they spotted four players: the technology developers, the vehicle manufacturers, platforms like Uber, and the customer. And not one of them wanted to "own the metal" - meaning the cars themselves.

"In this world, who owns the vehicle? Who manages it? Who services it, who does the maintenance? Who deals with lost property? Who cleans it?" Delano asks. Those are not questions that come up in investor presentations. They are questions that come up on a Monday morning when somebody has left a coffee on the back seat.

Moove's answer was to position itself as the company that does all those dull things. Today it is the fleet operator for Waymo in Phoenix, Miami and Las Vegas, with London next. It does not own the vehicles yet - but it plans to buy them, through debt financing. Delano says it already owns a robotaxi from another developer, but will not say which one.

"Our vision is to own hundreds of thousands of vehicles," he says.

Part of the money goes on hiring around 350 people and on building automated depots the company calls "nests" - facilities running around the clock where robots charge, service and maintain the fleet. Moove has around 15 depots at some stage of development. When the nests will actually be up and running, Delano will not say.

What is interesting here has nothing to do with technology. A company built on financing cars for drivers in Africa is now positioning itself as the owner of the infrastructure underneath autonomous transport in America and Europe. While Silicon Valley competed over who would write the better algorithm, somebody else quietly took the part everyone considered uninteresting: the car park, the charging cable and legal title to the metal.

It usually goes that way. The glory goes to whoever writes the software, and the bills get collected by whoever owns the yard.