Corporate investment in African startups reached 3-year high in early 2025

Africa has always lagged behind other continents in GCV’s CVC funding round data, but now there are signs of growing interest from corporate investors. In the first half of 2025, corporate-backed funding rounds for African startups reached their highest level since the tech bubble.

Between the first half of 2023 and the second half of 2024, there were at most 18 deals in any half-year period. In the first half of 2025, however, there were 26, an increase of 44%.

Local investors say that foreign venture capital firms are showing increasing interest in Africa. Historically, many have been put off by perceived risks — social and political instability as well as currency volatility. But this is beginning to change.

“It is growing at a fast pace, especially from India and Japan. In terms of the overall sector, besides the traditional partners like the EU, UK and US, some of the most noticeable contenders are now the UAE, Qatar, and Saudi. And then obviously the unavoidable China. Chinese VCs are not very visible from afar; however they are very present, especially in Nigeria,” says Ibrahim Sagna (pictured, right), executive chairman of Silverbacks Holdings, a private alternative investment firm deploying significant capital in some of the larger African startups.

Local African corporations, too, are more active in startup investment. Flour Mills of Nigeria, for example, took part in the $20m series A funding round raised by OmniRetail, the business-to-business ecommerce platform, in April. Flour Mills of Nigeria is one of the many manufacturers that uses the OmniRetail platform to sell products to retailers in West Africa. Morocco’s Attijariwafa Bank has a ventures unit which invests in startups in the region. Moroccan fertiliser group OCP has a number of investment funds, including Bidra Innovation Ventures, a $250m fund that writes cheques of up to $5m. These are all bringing more capital into the ecosystem.

African startups going global

Sagna believes Africa’s economy is transitioning to a new phase. Historically, outsiders have come to extract natural resources from Africa, and then more recently to do business by building infrastructure and telecom networks in the region. But in an increasingly connected global economy, African businesses are now themselves projecting outward, leveraging technology, exporting their ideas, culture and services to the rest of the world.

LemFi, for example, is a fintech company that started out solving remittances for Nigerian customers, but then expanded to do the same for neighbors, and then established itself organically and via acquisitions in the UK and US to serve migrants from India, China, and other Asian nations. “The biggest revenue now comes from western countries and Asia, and the company has strategically partnered with Visa,” says Sagna.

Another example is Moove, a mobility fintech company which started operations in Nigeria with Uber, expanded across a few African countries before expanding into 29 cities across five continents with over 3,000 employees. Today, the six-year-old startup is servicing global names such as Bolt, Grab, Glovo and is rolling out Waymo’s autonomous vehicles in Phoenix, Miami, and  London. Managing a global fleet of almost 40,000 vehicles, Moove has become the biggest player in its space in Brazil, Japan and the UAE.

“They started innovating with Africa, and eventually have become this dominant platform serving all continents, securing on the way equity backing from Uber, Blackrock, Franklin Templeton and MUFG, amongst others,” says Sagna.

Similarly, Trella, a shipping logistics platform — sometimes called the “Uber of trucks” — started as a local business in Egypt but has since expanded to the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia.

Geographic concentration

The spread of investment in Africa is extremely uneven, with most deals over the period concentrated in four countries: Egypt, South Africa, Kenya and Nigeria. Large parts of the 54-country continent recorded no deals, or just one or two.

The reason for the H1 2025 jump is, in part, because of an uptick in deals for Egyptian and South African startups, while Nigerian and Kenyan deals were about average. But there were also five countries – Tunisia, Ghana, Ethiopia, Togo and Uganda – which recorded corporate-backed deals for the first time in the period analysed.

Lack of series C deals

Another feature of the market is that funding rounds are overwhelmingly at the early stage, mainly seed and series A, with later stage rounds incredibly sparse. Only Nigerian financial services company Moniepoint and Egyptian fintech MoneyFellows raised series C rounds this year.

Sagna says, however, that an increasing number of the highest-performing businesses are breaking through the barrier.

“I would argue that for the top brass, it’s happening. The best founders are raising beyond series B. The ones that are fulfilling their promises, maybe it takes a bit longer than usual but they are definitely doing series C and beyond,” he says.

Silverbacks Holdings is one of those institutional investors trying to make a change by writing bigger cheques, up to $30m, for the best performers. The company’s model involves backing a network of Africa-focused VC funds and then investing directly in the top companies from these active portfolios. Sagna and his team deliberately focus on companies that consistently deliver more than 60% annual growth, are invoicing more than 30% of their revenues in hard currency and preferably have made the strategic move of securing within their cap table an industry relevant, global top tier corporate investor.

For this kind of company, Sagna argues, it is not hard to justify funding at series C and beyond.

A continental view can only tell us so much, given the large variation between, say, the Egyptian and South African economies. But there are some themes that stand out, even at a macro level.

Fintech dominates the market

Half of the deals tracked over the period were for financial startups. This is not surprising: Africa has long been touted as a centre for emerging fintechs. A 2022 McKinsey report cited a number of factors in its favour, including a rapidly urbanising population and growing smartphone use.

The maturity of the financial sectors in each country varies considerably though.

Nigeria is home to established fintechs such as Moniepoint and Opay, which offer online and app-based banking and payments services. Both raised money in the first half of this year.

It is interesting to note that Opay is a prominent example of Chinese investment in Africa. The company, which is owned by Zhou Yahui, a Chinese tech billionaire who is also the chairman of Opera Software, operates in Nigeria but its primary ownership and strategic leadership come from China. Meituan-Dianping, the Chinese food-delivery to ridesharing super-app, is among the investors in Opay.

The total value of fintech funding rounds in Nigeria over the period, where disclosed, came to $162.8m. This was even more than in South Africa, which has the most mature financial sector. And both of these countries were far ahead of Egypt, Seychelles and Kenya, where most of the remaining finance deals were clustered. This is despite a roughly similar number of financial startup funding rounds in each country.

In South Africa, insurance startups made large raises, including Naked Insurance, a fully digital provider, which raised $38m in a B+ round earlier this year. Hollard Group, a South African insurance company, took part in the round.

The Seychelles is an unusual case. Some 12 startups headquartered in the island nation (which is not pictured on the map above) raised funding from corporate investors in the period. Eight of these were crypto startups.

Seychelles has positioned itself as an offshore financial centre for years and has built a reputation as a crypto-friendly jurisdiction. KuCoin, a crypto exchange that began life in China, is based there, and took part in seven of the 12 funding rounds.

In February, Mango Network, a Seychelles-based blockchain technology developer, raised $13.5m from KuCoin and VC firms. Yellow Network, which hosts a decentralised clearing network for digital assets, raised $10m last September in a round that included the crypto company Consensys.

Agritech is a growing area

Finance was the largest contributor to the H1 2025 jump in deals, as the 14 funding rounds for startups in that sector was a much higher total than the average of eight in each earlier half-year period since 2023. But, although there were relatively few, IT and agtech startups pushed up the total as well.

GCV’s data only records four corporate-backed funding rounds for African IT startups over the period, and three of these happened in the first half of this year. These include two Egyptian startups. InfinLink makes semiconductor chips with optical connectivity technology. It raised $10m in a round that Taiwanese fabless semiconductor company MediaTek took part in. Qme, a software startup, raised $3m from investors that include UAE-based IT services and consultancy firm AHOY.

Food and agtech is also an area of growing interest, with two corporate-backed funding rounds in the first half of the year. One was the $7m raise by South Africa’s Khula, an agtech company that provides a digital marketplace connecting farmers with customers. Khula was backed by drinks company PepsiCo’s Kgodiso Fund, which aims to back startups in South Africa’s agricultural sector. Kumulus Water, a Tunisian startup making technology to produce drinking water from air, raised $3m from Spadel, a Belgian mineral water company.

OCP, the Moroccan fertiliser company, has also been an active investor in Africa. Younes Addou (pictured, right), who is vice president of agribusiness at the group’s Innovx venture unit, says Africa has the potential to solve global food security problems and become the world’s global carbon sink if the continent’s 270 million small farmers can be connected and mobilised in the right way.

“If we want to reach them in a short time we need strong innovation ecosystems,” says Addou. Innovx backs projects that connect various agribusiness technologies, companies and farmers, and which bring the best ideas from one African country across borders to new markets. For example, it worked with Pula, a Kenyan agricultural insurance company, to bring its model to rice farmers in the Ivory Coast. Next are plans to take the model to Nigeria and expand it to other crops such as maize and sorghum.

See all the corporate-backed startup funding rounds in Africa in the CVC Funding Round Database.