Nice one, Jan 2025! 🕶️
Start-ups in Africa raised nearly $300m in funding last month
Sorry, but before you can go any further, we need you to confirm you’re fully up to date with what happened in the start-up funding space on the continent in 2024…
All good? Perfect. Let’s proceed then…
Now, on to some good news! January 2025 has been a pretty solid month when it comes to start-up fundraising in Africa with a total of $289m raised through $100k+ deals (exc. exits). This is nearly 3.5x times the amount that was raised back in January 2024 ($85m) and actually the second-best month of January since at least 2019, second only to January 2022, in the heart of the funding heatwave. More than 90% of the funding raised in Jan was equity ($262m), 4.4x times more than in Jan 2024, and again the second-best month of Jan when it comes to equity fundraising since at least 2019.
We identified 40 $100k+ deals in the month. While this is less than what we’d registered in 2022, 2023 or 2024, on the positive side there was a total of 26 $1m+ deals amongst those, more than in Jan 2024 (21), and - you might have guessed already - the second-best month of Jan in terms of number of $1m+ deals since at least 2019.
The four largest deals - alone representing nearly 60% of all the funding raised on the continent last month - were all originating in one of the Big Four, though three out of four have to do with extension to other geographies, within or beyond the continent: PowerGen (Energy) raised $50m+ to establish a scalable platform for distributed renewable energy solutions across Africa; LemFi (Fintech) secured $53m to further expand into Asia and Europe; insure tech Naked bagged a $38m Series B to automate and expand its product offering; and Enko Education secured $24m to keep expanding its network of African schools…
We’ll stop here for today, because let’s be honest, things are quite busy at the moment. But for those of you who would want to dig deeper or do your own analysis, you can access the full database as always with a discount using this link. And while I’ve staid back in Paris for the AI Action Summit, Maxime is in Nairobi this week: if you see him go say hi and take a selfie 😜 Max
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