What most Shuttlers customers probably do not know is that the company’s earliest riders did not walk to a bus stop. When Shuttlers launched, it offered a door-to-door service before switching to the bus-stop-to-bus-stop model that Lagos commuters know today.
“We started with ‘doorstep to doorstep’, then moved to ‘bus stop to bus stop’, because it was difficult for us to coordinate without technology,” Damilola Olokesusi, Shuttlers’ co-founder and chief executive, told TechCabal in a video interview on September 9. After a few months, it also became clear the model was not profitable.
Shuttlers changed its pickup model after an angel investor gave the team two buses to test routes. The company restarted with buses running on fixed routes at fixed times, with passengers meeting them at designated stops. That is the Shuttlers model most Lagos commuters know today. The company says it has completed more than 10 million journeys with this model and now operates more than 430 buses daily across Lagos, Abuja and Port Harcourt.
On 25 September, Shuttlers will return to the doorstep with its new product, Shuttlers Pod, a car that picks up to four commuters from their homes, one after the other, and drops each person at their own destination. Riders must book ahead and can either share the car with neighbours heading the same way or pay for the whole car themselves.
“The scheduled part means you have to book in advance,” said Olokesusi. “That is the only way we can offer the service affordably. If it is a new pod, we allocate a vehicle around 24 hours before.”
Riders also “have to pay for at least two trips in a week,” she added, while the fare varies depending on how many people share the vehicle.
Shuttlers announced the product on September 4, two days after Uber shut down its Nigerian business following 12 years in the market. With Uber gone, Shuttlers sees an opening among commuters who pay for private rides in Lagos and now have one fewer option. Olokesusi said Pod is designed to attract customers beyond the commuters who already use Shuttlers’ buses.
But Pod revives two questions that ended the 2015 experiment: can home pickups make money, and can shared car rides work as a business?
“If anything, I think the fundamentals are actually worse than they were in 2022,” said Laolu Onifade, the former CEO of Hytch, a now-defunct carpooling startup. “Inflation has significantly reduced purchasing power, and there is a real ceiling to what consumers are willing or able to pay for transportation.”
Today, Shuttlers pays the fleet companies that supply its vehicles a fixed amount for each trip and takes on the job of filling the seats. On a bus, that promise is spread across 15 or 30 seats. On a Pod, it rests on four. How often Shuttlers can fill those seats will determine whether the model works.
“I wouldn’t say a four-seat fixed-pay model is impossible, but I wouldn’t build the business around the assumption that four seats automatically solve the economics,” said Onifade.
The walk to the bus stop
The first part of the commute is where Shuttlers loses some potential customers, Olokesusi told TechCabal. The company’s data shows that some customers spend 10 to 20 minutes getting to their bus stop, while others miss their buses because their last-mile transport arrives late or they cannot find one.
The problem worsens when Lagos floods.
“Around the flooding period, customers were finding it difficult to get to the bus stop,” she said, adding that many asked Shuttlers for help reaching the stop.
For some commuters, that first stretch determines whether they use Shuttlers at all.
“Getting to the bus stop early in the morning is a challenge that prevents some people from using Shuttlers,” Olokesusi said. “They either drive or use ride-hailing.”
Pod is built with those commuters in mind. “Picking them up from their doorstep gets us closer to those customers,” she said.
The beginning of Pods
When TechCabal spoke to Olokesusi on September 9, a week after Uber’s exit, one obvious question was whether Shuttlers had accelerated Pod because Uber was leaving.
“Honestly, it was almost as though we were sensing it,” she said.
Since the start of 2026, Olokesusi said, Shuttlers has been looking for ways to win customers beyond its existing base. The company has several products “sitting on the shelf,” including a Shuttlers for schools.
It tested the shared school service before shelving it after working through the unit economics. The company concluded that the market was not ready for the way it had designed the service, although it already runs a private school transport service. That turned the team’s attention to Pod, an idea it had been considering for about two years. The chief technology officer built the prototype himself, and staff began testing it.
Then Uber announced its exit. “When we saw the exit, we knew it was the time for us to launch Shuttlers Pod,” she said. When Shuttlers announced Pod, it was with a waitlist and three weeks away from the first ride.
How Pod works
To ride a Pod, you open the Shuttlers app, choose Pod, and enter your home address and destination. Shuttlers has divided Lagos into clusters and will open Pods one cluster at a time. If your area is covered, the app shows a list of departure times: 6:30 a.m., 7 a.m., 8 a.m., 9:30 a.m.
Say you pick 6:30 a.m. before anyone else has; the app tells you the pod is not live yet. It fills as a second, third, and fourth rider from your area books the same slot. “We cannot run a one-person pod on a four-person vehicle,” Olokesusi said. What you pay depends on how many people end up in it.
You can speed that up. Every booking comes with a link you can drop into a WhatsApp group to pull friends into your pod, but Shuttlers will not match you with someone who lives far away, even if you work in the same place. “If you live in VGC and the available vehicle is on a Chevron pod, we will not match you,” she said, naming two areas on the Lekki-Epe Expressway.
A group pod needs at least three riders to run. If you would rather not wait, book a solo pod and pay for every seat. Either way, you must commit to at least two trips a week. Once a pod forms, Shuttlers assigns a driver and car about 24 hours before the first trip, and on the morning itself, you get a notice 30 minutes before pickup, telling you the car has left its first stop. The app plans the route between the homes to keep the trip short.
Pod is starting in Lagos only. Victoria Island is among the first areas, alongside mainland routes Olokesusi did not name. Over 1,000 people had joined the waitlist when we spoke, and their requests had already surfaced on the 10 most popular routes. Shuttlers is pairing that with its own data on where young professionals live.
“If riders do not book in advance, they cannot get it cheaper,” she said.
Can Pod succeed where other carpooling products failed?
Home pickups are only one half of Pod. The other is getting people to share a car with strangers, a model that several Nigerian mobility startups have struggled to make work.
In 2023, Shuttlers expanded its fleet to meet demand for carpooling and recruited private cars into its network. It was entering the market where Hytch, Ridebliss, and GoMyWay had previously struggled to build a sustainable carpooling business.
Hytch eventually abandoned carpooling for logistics and later shut down, while GoMyWay also closed after struggling to raise more funding.
“We tried it. It did not work,” Olokesusi said.
A problem with traditional carpooling is the incentive for the driver.
A private car owner offers spare seats in a vehicle they already own. They are already making the trip, so the extra money from passengers is often a bonus rather than the reason for making the journey.
“The driver’s incentive might be to make friends or to offset fuel costs,” she said. Riders and drivers meet on the carpooling app, eventually swap numbers, and arrange the next trip without the app. “Carpooling like that is people matchmaking each other and then cutting the platform out of the deal,” she said. “It is a very nice social experiment in this part of the world, but it does not make money.”
Another problem is the car itself because a platform like Shuttlers cannot tell a private owner how to maintain their vehicle. “You can wake up one day, and the person you are riding with has biscuit crumbs in the car because their children have been eating in it,” she said. A carpool also depends on one person’s plans. If the rider has a stomach ache and stays home, nobody in the carpool gets a ride that day.
Shuttlers already run cars on its stop-to-stop model, carrying three or four passengers between bus stops at a slightly higher fare than the bus. Pod moves the pickup to the front door.
Olokesusi said Pod can clear those hurdles because the technology Shuttlers lacked in 2015, when it first ran a door-to-door product, now exists. Software, including AI, can group riders by address, she said, and picking up four neighbours is simpler than getting 20-plus people onto a bus inside a two-minute window. “We have done the harder part,” she said.
Pod’s answer to the carpooling supply problem is the model Shuttlers already runs for its buses. The startup does not plan to own Pod vehicles and will rely on fleet operators, as it currently does with the 160 fleet operators that supply more than 400 vehicles to the bus platform, and those operators employ the drivers.
An operator is a business with vehicle financing and other bills to pay. It needs the work every day, which gives Shuttlers the leverage to enforce rules on how cars are kept and how drivers are treated. To keep operators loyal, Shuttlers pays them before the seats are sold.
“With the Shuttlers model, we guarantee scheduled rides, and we guarantee our operators’ revenue,” she said. “When they come to do a trip on our platform, we have an agreement, and we pay a fixed amount.” If a rival tries to poach a driver, she said, the driver will ask whether that rival can pay in advance and guarantee work whether or not there are trips.
In 2023, Olokesusi told TechCabal that what a driver earns on a trip depends on the vehicle and is agreed upon onboarding, and that Shuttlers makes sure the seats are filled. If the operator’s pay per trip is fixed, every empty seat is Shuttlers’ cost. The size of the vehicle decides how much that hurts. On a 30-seat bus, one empty seat is about 3% of the seats on the trip. On a 15-seat bus, it is about 7%. On a four-seat Pod, it is 25%.
The price test
Olokesusi estimated that a Pod seat on one route would cost between ₦4,000 and ₦4,500 ($3.02 to $3.40).
If three passengers share the vehicle, the trip would generate between ₦12,000 and ₦13,500 ($9.07 to $10.21) in passenger revenue before Shuttlers pays the operator and accounts for its own costs. If four riders each pay that, the car takes in ₦16,000 to ₦18,000 ($12.10 to $13.61) for the trip.
That is roughly comparable to the ₦10,000 to ₦15,000 ($7.56 to $11.34) that a single ride-hailing trip on the same route might cost, based on Olokesusi’s estimate.
“The challenge is that you have to price each seat low enough to compete with Bolt and other alternatives, but high enough for the operator and platform to make money,” said Onifade. “That’s a very difficult middle ground. I wouldn’t say a four-seat fixed-pay model is impossible, but I wouldn’t build the business around the assumption that four seats automatically solve the economics.”
For Pods, passengers split the cost of a car, while Shuttlers tries to keep the vehicle sufficiently occupied to make the economics work. But the company still has to pay the operator’s fixed fee and retain a margin. The fee also has to compete with what the same vehicle could earn elsewhere.
One driver told TechCabal this month that an hour driving on Bolt or inDrive could generate between ₦12,500 and ₦13,000 ($9.45 to $9.83). A Pod trip involving multiple pickups in Lagos morning traffic could take longer than an hour.
That leaves Shuttlers with a difficult balancing act: make the ride cheap enough to attract passengers while keeping the vehicle productive enough to satisfy the operator.
Price is the ground Shuttlers has chosen to fight on, in a market where low fares, rising operating costs and intense competition have made ride-hailing difficult.
Uber’s global financial results show that its 2025 gross bookings averaged $14.26 per reported trip when total gross bookings are divided by total reported trips.
But that figure covers Uber’s global mobility, delivery and freight businesses and should not be treated as an average Uber fare. TechCabal’s reporting on Uber’s Nigerian exit found that individual Nigerian trips generated substantially lower values by comparison.
Rivals have also adapted their models to local conditions. Bolt accepts older vehicles than Uber did, while inDrive allows riders and drivers to negotiate fares.
Olokesusi thinks Pod can win there.
“If cost was one of the reasons Uber lost market share to other players in the ride-hailing space,” she said, a product still half the price of ride-hailing “can emerge as the number one solution in the space.”
Whether that happens will depend on something less visible than the fare displayed to passengers: occupancy.
Shuttlers needs enough commuters to share each Pod, enough routes to keep vehicles productive and enough repeat bookings to make the fixed-cost model work.
That is the same problem that has challenged carpooling startups before it.
“Three out of four sounds attractive on paper, but the real question is what you can charge per seat while remaining competitive and whether that revenue covers the full cost of the trip,” said Onifade.
“If you price too high, you’re competing with someone who can simply take a private Bolt or Uber. If you price too low, the platform fee and operator economics stop making sense,” Onifade added. “So I wouldn’t frame it as, “We only need three seats.” I’d first prove that the underlying unit economics work at all.”
Trust without the on-demand model
Shuttlers is also betting on trust.
The company’s first pilot ran in 2015, before Bolt launched in Lagos and before inDrive entered Nigeria. Its argument now is that a decade of operating scheduled transport gives it an advantage that a new carpooling platform would not have.
Shuttlers says Pod trips will be monitored by a live operations team, with AI used to flag unusual activity.
But Pod asks commuters to make a different trade-off from the one they make with Uber, Bolt or inDrive.
They give up spontaneity for a lower price.
They must know where they are going, book ahead, commit to recurring trips and, if they want the shared fare, wait for other people to join.
That may be the biggest test of the product.
Shuttlers has already shown that Nigerians will plan their commute around a scheduled bus. Now it wants to find out whether they will do the same for a car and whether enough of them will choose the same route at the same time, often enough to make the numbers work.
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