Australia's ride share firm says $300m cash injection will help expand electric fleet

Australia’s largest ride-share operator Splend is hoping that another major cash injection will get it to a long-telegraphed goal of 10,000 vehicles in its fleet, much of them electric.

The Australian company says it has raised another $300 million in senior debt, bringing its total debt financing to more than $500 million. The latest sum is mostly from Macquarie’s asset finance arm, and MA Financial is adding another $15 million to its current loan to the company.

The extra cash is set to accelerate Splend’s gear shift into the UK and help it solidify its position in Australia, by expanding the fleet to more than 10,000 cars in 2025 and 20,000 by the end of 2026.

It hopes to make more of those vehicles electric.

But whether the company can achieve these numbers is another topic, as it has been promising to hit a 10,000 car target for a number of years.

Splend started in 2015, tapping into a need for rideshare drivers to have access to a car through leasing and financing packages. In 2018, it tapped Element Fleet Management for $220 million to get the company to a goal of 15,000 vehicles by late 2019, from a then-1700.

At the time it was also operating in Toronto and Mexico City. In 2022 the company raised $150 million in equity to build a 10,000-strong fleet of EVs by 2024.

A Splend spokesperson says the fleet is currently “about 7000” strong.

The company does say that “more than 50 per cent” of its fleet across Australia and the UK is electric: it has promised to stop renting internal combustion cars by 2029, and added Polestar 2 and Tesla Model 3 models to the fleet in 2022.

In August, after raising a second tranche of $20 million from the Clean Energy Finance Corporation (CEFC), it said that funding was going towards growing the Australian fleet to 5000 cars by the end of 2024, including 2000 EVs.

Splend did not make its executives available to talk to The Driven, despite putting out a media release.