May 2025 - Another good month 😊

$250m+ were raised last month, with a total of $1bn+ invested in start-ups in Africa since the beginning of 2025

Start-ups in Africa raised just north of a quarter of a billion dollars ($254m) last month. While this is not breaking any records, it is making March’s poor performance look more and more like a blip. With over $1bn raised in the first five months of the year (🎊), 2025 compares very favourably to 2024 ($750m over the same period, +40%) for instance. What’s also encouraging is that start-ups in Africa have raised $2.5b over the past 12 months (June 2024-May 2025), the highest total for a 12-month period since early last year.

A total of 36 start-ups announced funding over $100k+ in May (exc. exits), slightly lower than in the past few months. On the positive side though, it means the median deal value was higher. In fact, no less than seven ventures raised over $10m last month. The largest deal was Egypt-based Nawy’s $75m raise ($52m Series A round led by Partech + $23m in debt), by far the largest proptech deal on the continent ever. Actually, Egyptian start-ups were on a roll last month, as they were responsible for 6 of the 7 $10m+ announcements: on top of Nawy, Tasaheel - part of MNT-Halan (fintech) - finalised Egypt’s largest corporate bond issuance ($50m); Valu raised $27m from Saudi investors and is on track to list publicly imminently; Thndr (fintech, again) raised a $15m+ round, and so did Sylndr (Series A, mobility); finally Money Fellows (… fintech) secured a $13m pre-Series C to expand outside of Egypt. The only outlier on this list was South African healthtech AURA who raised a ~$15m Series B, co-led by Partech and CAIF, to expand to the US.

All in all, Egypt is currently topping the charts in terms of start-up investments (exc. exits) in 2025 so far with 31% ($330m+) of the funding raised, followed by South Africa (26%), Nigeria (15%), and Kenya (12%).

Finally, four exits were also announced in May, and guess what… three of them involved Egyptian ventures with MaxAB-Wasoko acquiring Fatura, Miran and Welnes merging, and the first ever SPAC merger in the country happening with Catalyst Partners Middle East acquiring Qardy for an estimated $23m. Over in West Africa, BioLite acquired a majority stake in Baobab+.

If you need access to a comprehensive list of VC deals in Africa, not just for May 2025, but since 2019 (!), you can access all the data behind our analyses for a small fee when you sign up for access to our database. And for an even smaller fee, you should use this link ;) Now, there are just another three weeks to go and we’ll be halfway through the year. Scary, I know. But it also means we’ll soon be able to look at H1 numbers and trends. And that’s exciting! More soon… Max