March Disappoints. Drags Down Q1 Perf.

Start-ups in Africa raise $460m in Q1, despite a promising January.

As you may remember, the ecosystem started the year on a high, with close to $300m raised by start-ups in January. February wasn’t as good ($119m), yet we still found reasons to be optimistic. The performance in March was poor in comparison though, as only $50m in funding were announced, one of the lowest monthly tallies since late 2020. That said, the number of start-ups announcing funding was on par with previous months; the issue is that there was no deals over $10m announced….

In any case, what does it mean for Q1 2025?

As you can imagine, the March counter performance dragged the numbers down quite a bit. All in all, start-ups raised $460m in Q1 through $100k+ deals (exc. exits), which is actually not much below the Q1 2024 number ($486m, -5% YoY). The issue is that Q1 2024 already wasn’t a particularly good quarter. In fact, Q1 2025 is the second-lowest quarter in terms of start-up funding since late 2020. Things are looking more positive if we focus on the number of start-ups who announced at least $1m of funding in Q1: with 52, this is aligned with the 2023-2024 average.

Unsurprisingly, 83% of the funding went to the Big Four with Kenya, Nigeria and South Africa attracting roughly $100m in funding each (24%, 24% and 22% of the total respectively), followed by Egypt ($61m, 14%). Togo completed the top five, thanks to Gozem’s $30m Series B funding round. Almost half of the funding (46%) was raised by fintech start-ups ($53m for LemFi, $38m for Naked etc.), followed as usual by energy (18%) and logistics & transportation (10%).

Just over 2% of the funding was raised by female CEOs ($10m), with the largest such round being a $6.2m grant to South African biotech African Biologics. If we were to remove grants from the total, the share of funding raised by female CEOs in Q1 2025 would fall to 0.7%. At the end of the day, 79% of the funding went to either solo male founders (11%) or male-only founding teams (67%). Diverse founding teams attracted 20% of the total - which isn’t great, but is actually not a bad performance compared to previous quarters. A mere 1% was invested in solo female founders or female-only founding teams…

OK, Q1 wasn’t the best quarter overall, but it’s not all doom and gloom if we zoom back and look at longer-term trends. Watch out for our next post to learn more… In the meanwhile, our database is the place to go if you need access to all the deal data we use for our analyses: we now have just under $20 billions’ worth of deals (inc. exits) since 2019 involving 2,250+ start-ups! And if you like discounts, you’ll want to use this link instead ;) A la semaine prochaine! Max