Who is behind Africa's Top💯 Most Funded Start-Ups?
The reign of founding teams, male founders & CEOs, and African CEOs
Welcome back to our three-part series on the Top 100 start-ups that have raised the most funding in Africa since 2019. If you’ve missed the first two episodes, you’ll find them here:
Today, we’re looking at the people behind all these ventures. ‘Teamwork makes the dream work’, as they say. Indeed, the vast majority of the Top 100 (88 out of 100) were co-founded by teams, as opposed to solo founders. Which doesn’t mean you can’t found a start-up on your own and raise $100m+ like Mitchell Elegbe, Dare Okoudjou or Andrew Watkins-Ball have done with Interswitch, onafriq and Jumo respectively. The sweet spot however seems to be duos (50 out of 100), though three’s not always a crowd (35).
Gender-wise, things don’t look too balanced. Indeed, 84 out of the Top 100 have either been founded by a solo man founder or an all-men founding team. In fact, in the Top 25, there is only one woman (Christina Sass, one of Andela’s 6 initial co-founders), out of a total of 49 co-founders… Only 16 ventures out of the Top 100 most-funded start-ups have a gender-diverse founding team. And none have been founded by a solo woman founder or an all-women founding team.
This has a direct impact on who the CEOs are, as they are almost always the founder or one of the co-founders, at least for the first few years (unless something particularly bad happens). Only 3 of the CEOs in the Top 100 are currently women. Anu Adasolum and Belinda Shaw have been CEOs since they co-founded sabi and Cape Bio Pharms respectively. Carrol Chang was appointed CEO of Andela in August 2024. Three additional start-ups on the list have had women as CEOs in the past: Gro Intelligence (whose CEO and co-founder Sara Menker was replaced in 2024, shortly before the company went into liquidation), Kobo360 (where Cikü Mugambi was CEO from August 2023 until November 2024; she is now with DOB Equity), and Lori (where Uche Ogboi was CEO between mid-2021 and early 2023).
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Finally, as discussions about local vs. expat founders are recurring in the ecosystem, we thought we would try to look at the proportion of ‘African CEOs’ in this Top 100. It is a tricky exercice for some of them, and identifying who is ‘African’ and who isn’t (or what that means exactly) is not trivial. Not to mention it is not up to us to decide what these criteria are. For that reason, this is not a field we include in our database. (We’ve offered repeatedly to work with an African researcher who would be interested in doing this analysis on the full database, and remain open to candidates). To the best of our knowledge, 68 CEOs in the Top 100 could likely be considered as ‘African CEOs’ (defined as either national of an African country, or with significant African heritage). While the exact statistic should be used with all the right caveats, we believed that at the very least the order of magnitude was an interesting data point to share…
This concludes our three-part series on the Top 100 most-funded start-ups in Africa. I hope you found this cut of the data interesting, and as always, we continue to welcome your thoughts and ideas for future analysis. The data behind all this remains available if you subscribe to our database. And guess what: the month is nearly over, which means we’ll soon be looking at both September and Q3 numbers... Stay tuned! Max
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