Start-ups in Africa recorded $50m in funding inflow in March, the lowest monthly tally since late 2020, a new report has indicated.
According to Africa: The Big Deal, which focuses on the start-up sector on the continent, there has been a decline in funding flow to start-ups from February, which worsened in March.
The start-up ecosystem started the year on a high, with close to $300m raised in January. It declined to $119m in February; however, it dipped sharply to $50m in March, which Africa: The Big Deal said it was “one of the lowest monthly tallies since late 2020.”
Despite the poor numbers, the number of start-ups announcing funding was on par with previous months, but no deals over $10m were announced.
Quarterly, start-ups raised $460m in Q1 through $100k+ deals (exc. exits), lower than Q1 2024’s $486m, indicating -5 per cent YoY. The data also showed that Q1 2025 is the second-lowest quarter in terms of start-up funding since late 2020.
The report read, “Expectedly, 83 per cent of the funding went to the Big Four, with Kenya, Nigeria and South Africa attracting roughly $100m in funding each (24 per cent, 24 per cent and 22 per cent of the total, respectively), followed by Egypt ($61m, 14 per cent). Togo completed the top five, thanks to Gozem’s $30m Series B funding round.
“Almost half of the funding (46 per cent) was raised by fintech start-ups ($53m for LemFi, $38m for Naked, etc.), followed as usual by energy (18 per cent) and logistics & transportation (10 per cent).”
On the diversity front, just over two per cent of the funding was raised by female chief executive officers ($10m), with the largest such round being a $6.2m grant to South African biotech African Biologics.
The report further read, “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 per cent. At the end of the day, 79 per cent of the funding went to either solo male founders (11 per cent) or male-only founding teams (67 per cent).
“Diverse founding teams attracted 20 per cent of the total – which isn’t great but is not a bad performance compared to previous quarters. A mere one per cent was invested in solo female founders or female-only founding teams.”
