Monthly Evolution of Startup Funding in Africa (Jan 2019 – May 2022)

Start-ups in Africa are breaking a new record every month, though one key market is losing steam.

Article by Max Cuvellier (www.thebigdeal.substack.com)

Jun 7, 2022

In recent posts we have covered the ecosystem’s accelerating growth (e.g. here or here), and last week, we put this growth into perspective, comparing it to other regions globally. As we analysed the numbers, we were struck by how strong the ecosystem’s performance is this year, month in, month out. As a matter of fact, a new monthly record has been set every single month so far in 2022.

January 2022 was the strongest January the ecosystem had ever seen; likewise for February, March, April, and May. If you add November and December 2021, Africa is now on a 7-month record-breaking strike. And YoY growth is not marginal at all: except in May (+90%), we’re talking about at least a doubling in value compared to the same month a year before. Is this growth evenly spread amongst the Big Four? Well, Kenya is on an 8-month winning strike, with some incredible results: in April 2022, start-ups in Kenya raised 83 times the amount they had raised in April 2021. Nigeria and Egypt are also doing really well, though they both recorded one month of negative YoY growth in 2022 so far (January and April respectively).

The situation in South Africa – as we noted before – is getting slightly worrying though: the country has underperformed YoY every single month since the beginning of the year. As it stands, start-ups in South Africa have raised -30% in the January-May period compared to how much they had raised during the same period last year. This compares to growth of +154% in Nigeria, +212% in Egypt and +436% in Kenya…