Ampersand: Three-Minute Battery Swaps

East Africa's cities run on motorcycle taxis, and their drivers spend a large share of daily earnings on petrol. Ampersand's answer was not a better battery but a different model: riders never charge, they pull into a station and exchange a depleted battery for a full one in about three minutes. The network now delivers more than 20,000 swaps a day across Rwanda and Kenya, powering over 6,000 electric motorcycles, with the company assembling around 100 e-motorcycles and 140 batteries a week. More than 60 women ride in its driver network, in a trade that is almost entirely male. In 2025 Ampersand opened the swap network to third-party manufacturers — the infrastructure, rather than the vehicle, turning out to be the thing worth building.