Best October on record 🌳💜

Start-ups in Africa raised $250m+ in funding last month, while Moniepoint made headlines

By now, we assume that you’ve all checked out our 3-part series (1, 2 & 3) on Q3 numbers, and have downloaded the underlying deck. So let’s move on, shall we:

Believe it or not, it’s November already, as you can tell by the jacarandas blooming all over Nairobi, and Southern Africa’s main cities. And purple must be a lucky colour as October 2024 was a good vintage: 42 start-ups raised a total of $254m in funding through $100k+ equity, debt and grant deals (excluding exits) last month. From an amount perspective, this is the second-best month this year (after July), and almost 50% over the previous 12-month average. As a matter of fact, it is the best October on record since 2019!

Nigerian Fintech Moniepoint’s $110m Series C (43% of the total) was on everybody’s lips last week, and understandably so. The continent is thought to have minted its 8th unicorn (though the valuation of some of Moniepoint’s peers is based on their last raise which in some cases is getting quite old…). The other two largest rounds last month were BasiGo’s $42m Series A and cryptocurrency exchange Yellow Card’s $33m Series C. Overall, 60% of the funding in October went to start-ups in Nigeria, and 60% to Fintech; 98% was invested in start-ups with a male CEO; 97% in ventures without a female founder (#notimpressed). One exit was also announced last month: OmniRetail acquired Traction Apps in Nigeria.

In 2024 so far, start-ups in Africa have now raised $1.7 billion in total (exc. exits), down -32% YoY compared to the same time in 2023. Last year, this much had already been announced by early June i.e. almost 5 months earlier than in 2024. 393 ventures have already raised $100k or more in 2024 (-10% YoY), 137 of which have announced $1m or more in funding (-20% YoY). Now… Bring it on, November!

Do you need access to the full list of deals? If you haven’t already, you can subscribe to our database with a little discount using this link. We’re talking less than $15 monthly to receive an updated list of all $100k+ deals in Africa every month. That’s around 35¢ a deal, and we have ~30 data points per deal … How much would you need to spend if you wanted to compile this data yourself? Anyway, if you don’t need that level of detail, you’re still welcome to our free (almost) weekly insights here of course! Bonne journée :) Max