Key questions this article answers:
-
Africa’s startup ecosystem hit a new funding milestone in February 2023. Does this development point to a recovery from the funding slowdown in 2022?
-
A new African Unicorn was born in February. Where can you find this Unicorn, and how does this deal affect sectoral and regional funding performance?
“Don’t sleep, wake up, collect your money….” Kizz Daniel’s song aptly captures the startup funding situation in 2021, where African startups definitely collected their money and recorded a major milestone of $4.6 billion in funding.
However, 2022 was less soft. As Stears showed in an analysis of major trends in the African ecosystem last year, funding slowed. Rising interest rates in advanced economies attracted investors to safer assets—especially in the third and fourth quarters of the year contributed to 2022's slow funding in the ecosystem.
Despite the slowdown, we also highlighted in our 2022 summary that
