Q1 2024 in a nutshell 🥜

120+ start-ups in Africa raised a combined $466 million in the first quarter of the year through $100k+ deals

Believe it or not, the first quarter of the year is already behind us… So for this week’s post, we’re looking at our database to see how things went in Q1:

• A total of $466 million were raised through $100k+ deals by 121 start-ups (excluding exits). This represented a -27% decrease QoQ, and only half of the amount that was raised a year earlier in Q1 2023.

• Equity formed the majority of the disclosed funding (71%), with debt making up the rest (28%). While equity held up QoQ, the amount of debt disclosed was halved between Q4 2023 and Q1 2022.

• 7 exits were announced last quarter, including HRtech PaySpace’s acquisition by Deel (amount undisclosed but rumoured to be over $100m) and fintech nCino’s acquisition of DocFox for $75m, both in South Africa.

• Only one start-up raised more than $25m in Q1: moove, with $110m announced this quarter in total: a $100m Series B round led by Uber, and a $10m debt deal to finance its India expansion. Moov alone attracted 24% of the funding on the continent in Q1, therefore influencing other trends.

• 87% of the funding went to start-ups HQ’ed in the Big Four with 60% going to Nigeria (2/3 of which were the moove deals) and Kenya. Few other countries managed to claim more than $5m in funding during the period.

• From a sectoral standpoint, Transport & Logistics snatched the number 1 spot in terms of total amount raised (the moove deals making nearly 3/4 of that amount), followed by fintech. In number of $100k+ deals, fintech was top, and Agri & Food second. Combined, ClimateTech (cutting across multiple sector) represented 31% of $100k+ deals and 27% of the total amount invested.

• Funding continued to favour male-founded and male-led ventures with less than 1% allocated to start-ups without at least one male founder, and 6.5% to female CEOs

That’s it for today, but we’ll be digging a big deeper into some of these trends in the coming days, don’t you worry... However, despite the great feedback we’ve received on our 2023 round-up Linkedin Live event, we won’t be able to do one of those for Q1 unfortunately. It’s just too busy these days! But we’ll do our best to come back with a killer H1 2024 virtual powwow. Oh, and for those of you who are not yet subscribers to our database, check out our Linkedin page as we may be dropping a sweet little discount on Thursday April 4th… 🤫