Funding, founders, scaleups and the deals reshaping African innovation.
Small Foundation has backed Nairobi's Unmarkets, which builds agribusinesses by pairing capital with established African food companies rather than funding founders from scratch. The investment launches four new Kenyan ventures.
Terra Industries closed its seed round at $52M this week to mass-produce autonomous defence drones in Ghana and Nigeria, becoming Africa's most-funded defence-tech startup. It is scaling faster than any global rulebook for the weapons it builds.
Maket's decision to keep sellers anonymous, not the app itself, is why a Dakar resale marketplace is gaining trust where a European clone failed.
Briter's H1 2026 data shows African startup funding up 73% to $3.3 billion, but the record hides how much of it rode on Zipline's drone-delivery megaround and Spiro's electric-motorcycle raises.
Egypt's Fincart closed an oversubscribed $2.8M seed round to expand its AI-powered platform that automates courier selection and cash reconciliation for e-commerce merchants across a market still dominated by cash-on-delivery.
Africa's venture capital hit $1.44 billion in H1 2026, but women-led startups captured a record-low 2.2% of total funding in 2025 - despite outgrowing male-led peers on almost every metric investors claim to chase.
VOVE ID has opened its first public cohort to run African fintechs and other regulated startups through a 24-question compliance audit, wagering that founders would rather discover gaps themselves than have an investor or regulator find them first.
PwC has opened bidding for KOKO Networks' bioethanol technology, India manufacturing plant and fuel-distribution platform after the Kenyan clean-cooking pioneer's carbon-credit-dependent model collapsed.
