From Senegal to Zoox: How Aicha Evans Leads a $1.3 Billion Self-Driving Car Company

A girl born in Dakar, Senegal, sold her self-driving robotaxi company to Amazon for $1.3 billion, and stayed on as CEO. This is the story of Aicha Evans, CEO of Zoox.

From Dakar and Paris to computer engineering in the US

Aicha Evans was born in Senegal and raised between Dakar and Paris. She moved to the United States to study computer engineering, graduating in 1996 as one of the few Black women in the entire field.

Then she did what so many of us in the diaspora do: put her head down and outworked the room. Over a decade at Intel, she rose to Chief Strategy Officer, running a 7,000-person division at one of the biggest technology companies on earth.

Walking away at the top

At the peak of her corporate career, she left. In 2019, she became CEO of Zoox, a small startup with a wild mission: build a fully autonomous robotaxi from scratch. Not retrofitting old cars like the competition, but designing an entirely new vehicle around autonomy itself.

Months in, the money nearly ran out and investors got cold feet. So she restructured the company, tightened everything, and pushed her team to a working prototype.

A $1.3 billion acquisition, and she kept the seat

Less than a year later, Amazon acquired Zoox for $1.3 billion. But here is the part we love most: she did not cash out and disappear. She kept the CEO seat.

Today, Zoox robotaxis carry real passengers through Las Vegas and San Francisco, and recently launched in Austin, the same city that will host BeyondAfrica Conference 2026. Over 350,000 riders and counting.

Why this matters

An African woman is literally driving the future of transportation. This is what the diaspora is capable of, and there are thousands more stories like hers.

That is exactly why we are hosting the BeyondAfrica Conference: to put the people making global impact in one room in Austin on November 7, 2026. Read more spotlights on the blog, and join the newsletter for who we feature next.