1, 2, 3... and now 4 billion USD 💸💸💸💸

More than $4bn of funding has been raised by start-ups in Africa through 754 deals $100k & over this year!

We’re still a bit shocked (in a good way! 😊) by the amount of positive feedback we’ve received after publishing last week’s map, but the ecosystem gives us no time to rest as it now crosses the $4 billion mark in funding raised by start-ups in Africa trough deals $100k & over. Instead of repeating the analysis from last week though, we thought we’d build another visual and dive a little deeper on a couple interesting points that came up in the many discussions we had last week, starting with the relative weight of the “Big Four” of course: 80% of the total amount raised and 76% of all deals; 35% and 29% respectively for Nigeria alone. The share of $100m+ ‘mega deals’ in the funding raised in the most dynamic countries also came up quite a bit: it ranges from 90% in Senegal, to 55% in Nigeria, 39% in South Africa, 37% in Egypt and 0% in Kenya where the largest deal this year was Gro Intelligence’s $85m Series B. Another way to look at it is how much the single largest deal so far this year represents in the total raised: 90% in Senegal still, 28% in Nigeria (OPay), 23% in Kenya (Gro), 20% in Egypt (MNT-Halan) and 14% in South Africa (Jumo). On a last note, these ‘mega deals’ should not overshadow the tremendous activity in the ecosystem: Yes, those 11 deals have made up 44% of the funding raised this year so far, but the remaining 743 deals still add up to a whopping $2.23bn!

Thank again for your amazing support sharing last week’s post: it’s been by far our most successful to date. As always, the database containing all these deals, plus those from 2019 and 2020 is still available here at a discount.

Oh, and before you leave, a little reward for those of you who have read this post until the end: last week’s map updated with the numbers as of December 1st. Enjoy!