Q1 2023 results - Blowing hot 🥵 and cold 🥶
Not a bad performance considering the context, but some cause for concern...
Now that the Q1 books are closed, let’s have a look at the numbers for the first quarter of the year: some good - and not so good - stuff…
🥵 On many accounts, Q1 2023 was a good quarter, especially if we consider that expectations were pretty low when it started. Start-ups in Africa raised more than $1.3bn in Q1 (including exits), their best quarter since the start of the meltdown in mid-2022, and comparable to Q2 2022. At $700m, February 2023 was actually the continent’s third best month ever in terms of funding raised by start-ups (after September 2021 and March 2022). Oh, and of course InstaDeep’s acquisition by BioNTech made history in January.
🥶 That said, Q1 2023 missed the mark if we compare it to Q1 2022 with a -29% YoY decrease (- 52% YoY if we exclude exits - scroll all the way down for the graph). The number of $100k+ deals is also a matter for concern with just over 150 recorded in Q1 2023, less than half the Q1 2022 tally (300+). In fact, you have to go all the way back to 2020 to find a quarterly number of deals so low. Worse still, with only $66m raised, March 2023 was the worst month in 2.5 years (since August 2020) and the first time the monthly amount of funding raised by start-ups in Africa dipped below the $100m mark since 2020. March funding shrunk by a factor of 11x (!) between 2022 and 2023…
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The same happens at the end of every quarter: we’re left hanging, desperate to know what next quarter’s numbers will be like. Well in the meanwhile, if you want to dive deeper into this quarter’s numbers (and the previous sixteen quarters’ numbers!), check out our deals database (with a 10% discount, just for you). And in case you missed our special post last week for our second anniversary, don’t worry, as the playground remains open for you to visually explore our data yourself!
Funding raised graph, excluding exits. The main difference in 2023 is the 9-digit InstaDeep sale in January.