Zeda’s Avis subscription network has grown 49 percent year-on-year. That growth did not come from new vehicles or expanded sales teams. It came from infrastructure. Specifically, a platform called Reflex.
Reflex is a mobility infrastructure layer developed by South African startup FlexClub. It has been live for just over a year and already underpins two of the country’s fastest-scaling vehicle networks. Zeda credits Reflex as the core driver behind the 49 percent jump in subscriptions, making it one of the strongest early validations for Reflex as a full-stack platform built to enable mobility-as-a-service.
FlexClub formally unveiled Reflex this month, though the platform has quietly been operating in production since April 2024. It is built to let any brand, whether fleet-owning or asset-light, launch and scale a mobility network. The Avis subscription network is one proof point. The FlexClub network is another.
“The future of mobility will be networked, and that future demands better technology,” said Tinashe Ruzane, FlexClub’s co-founder and CEO. “Reflex gives brands the building blocks to create vehicle access products that are modular, scalable and digital by default.”
Reflex currently powers two very different mobility models. One is Zeda’s Avis network, which has digitised a traditional long-term rental business. The other is FlexClub, a virtual mobility network that offers car access without owning or operating a fleet. This mirrors the MVNO playbook from telecoms, where brands lease infrastructure and go to market with their own experience layer.
These use cases are intentionally designed to show the flexibility of the Reflex platform. Whether a business owns assets or not, Reflex allows it to build a branded, customer-facing vehicle subscription product on top of a battle-tested backend.
The infrastructure play
At its core, Reflex is a development platform. It allows brands to create vehicle access experiences through APIs and modular plug-ins. The current stack includes:
- Online customer onboarding with dynamic plan configuration
- Wallet-based billing with deposits, top-ups and recurring payments
- Identity, phone and address verification as separate modules
- Embedded UX that can be deployed across brand websites, agent portals or partner ecosystems
The platform has processed more than 30,000 user accounts to date and is expected to facilitate hundreds of millions of rand in wallet transactions in the next 12 months.
“Mobility has lacked its version of Stripe or Twilio,” Ruzane said. “We are trying to fill that gap by making vehicle access programmable.”
A startup thinking like a platform
FlexClub was founded by Ruzane, Idan Jaan and Howie Sommerfeld. Their backgrounds span Uber, TymeBank and several US and African SaaS startups. Their approach with Reflex is product-first, API-centric and clearly informed by platform infrastructure plays across other industries.
The company is backed by Kindred Ventures, early investors in Uber, Postmates and Coinbase. A number of global family offices are also backing the mission to redefine vehicle access as a software-led product.
Now that Reflex has a year of data and two high-growth networks running on it, FlexClub is making the platform available to other brands. These could include fintechs, insurers or dealership groups looking to embed flexible vehicle access into their ecosystems without building from scratch.
With Reflex, the hard part is already done. Brands define their commercial model, configure their customer journey and go to market in weeks.
Zeda’s results show that infrastructure scale is possible in the vehicle access category. Reflex, once largely under the radar, is now looking like mobility’s most important backend.