Startups
Funding, founders, scaleups and the deals reshaping African innovation.
- Startups
A Lagos SoftPOS Startup Just Beat 88 Countries in Geneva — And Won $40,000, Not $20,000
Nearpays, an Abuja-based fintech that turns smartphones into card readers, won the UN's AI for Good Innovation Factory 2026 in Geneva on July 9 — then musician will.i.am doubled its prize on the spot.
35d ago - Startups
Fewer deals, bigger checks: African tech quietly notched its biggest H1 ever
African startups raised $1.44 billion in H1 2026 on just 146 disclosed deals — down from 252 a year earlier — while M&A nearly doubled to 63 deals, the clearest sign yet that the continent's funding market is consolidating rather than shrinking.
35d ago - Startups
FoodCourt Called Itself Profitable. Then It Couldn't Pay Its Cooks.
The Y Combinator-backed Nigerian cloud kitchen paused all operations after months of unpaid wages and vendor debt, exposing a gap between its public growth story and its cash position.
37d ago - Startups
Africa needs $2.8 trillion for climate adaptation. Catalyst Fund just added $30 million to the $30 billion it's actually getting.
Nairobi-based Catalyst Fund closed a $30m second close backed by IFC, Shell Foundation and We-Fi, betting that pairing capital with hands-on venture-building is the fastest way to close Africa's climate-finance gap one founder at a time.
37d ago - Startups
Grey's newest feature looks tiny. It's really a bid to own Africa's money on-ramp.
The Y Combinator-backed payments company now lets users in Ghana and Kenya fund accounts directly in cedis and shillings via bank transfer and mobile money — a small tweak that quietly decides where the continent's cross-border money starts.
37d ago - Startups
LemFi buys its way into wealthtech — and bets the diaspora is finally ready to invest, not just send
LemFi, the Nigerian-founded fintech built on diaspora remittances, has secured UK regulatory approval to acquire investment platform Wealth8 — its move into wealthtech, and a bet that migrant communities are ready to climb from sending money home to building wealth where they live.
37d ago - Startups
Google Play puts $1m behind African game studios — the money the continent's biggest funders keep skipping
Google Play's first Indie Games Fund in Africa will split $1 million equity-free across 10 Sub-Saharan studios. In a year dominated by fintech and falling deal counts, it is a rare cheque written for a sector investors have long treated as a hobby.
38d ago - Startups
A South African AI coding startup bets the hard part isn't writing code — it's shipping it
HyperDev, the generative-AI coding platform chaired by HyperionDev founder Riaz Moola, has raised over $1 million in pre-seed funding — wagering that the real bottleneck for a new generation of builders is turning AI-generated code into software that actually ships.
39d ago
