Hey there, Astronauts! Have you looked into the rearview mirror lately? 👩‍🚀

Taking a minute to celebrate the fantastic trajectory the African ecosystem has been on in the past decade

If you attended the AESIS 2023 event organised by VC4A and ABAN in Cape Town a few days ago, you probably caught Maxime’s opening presentation where he started by reminding the crowd of the African start-up and VC ecosystem’s incredible journey since 2013. We believe this message is particularly important as the news of the past few months has been dominated by talks of YoY decline, funding winter and start-ups closing… :/

Very little has been documented when it comes to pre-2012 start-up activity. If you’ve been in this space long enough, you will remember the frenzy around the Africa Internet Group (you might know them as… Jumia Group) deal of 2012 with investments from Rocket Internet and Millicom ($45m they say?), one of very (very) few Series A on the continent at that time.

And since 2013, the growth has been nothing short of incredible. Indeed, in a decade (2013-2022), funding raised by start-ups in Africa (assuming we count everything: equity, debt, grants, exits…) has blown up over 400x times from a mere $12m in 2013 (source: Disrupt Africa) to approximately $5 billion in 2022 (source: yours truly). Even with the slowdown the ecosystem’s experienced in the past year or so, we’ll still be looking at more than 120x growth if we consider the 2014-2023 decade.

Whether you were there from day one, or are just getting to learn about the ecosystem, I think we can all agree this is pretty spectacular growth…

It feels like a real privilege to have been able to follow the past decade of growth in the ecosystem. What doesn’t feel great though is to have missed AESIS and all the great events that happened in Cape Town in the past month or so… I heard great stories from Maxime and others, and I really hope I can join so many of you next year! Btw, on a totally unrelated note, do you know if there’s a term for African space crews? I know astronauts are American, cosmonauts Russian, taikonauts Chinese and spationauts Europeans, but is there a term yet for Africans? Anyway, I’m getting carried away, so let me drop your customary database discount here, and say: Bye! Max