Tech Champions

Start-ups: African champions in the consolidation era

This article is part of the dossier: Top 50 tech champions

By Quentin Velluet
Posted on Friday, 6 May 2022 11:10, updated on Tuesday, 8 November 2022 15:26

Some twenty start-ups on the continent have reached the Series C financing stage. To maintain their growth rate, mergers and acquisitions are a choice option.

This is part 10 of an 11-part series.

Boosted by foreign funding, African tech raised more than $5 billion in 2021. There are now about 20 companies on the continent that have already reached their third round of funding aka Series C (including 12 in the last two years), which makes them capable of major strategic moves, whether by merger or acquisition. They are mainly active in fintech (Flutterwave, Chipper or Jumo), transportation and delivery (SWVL or Elmenus), healthcare (mPharma), e-commerce (Copia Global) or education (Andela and Spark Schools).

.no-script-hidden { display: none }

Your browser could not fetch this story

If you are reading this message your browser has Javascript disabled. Please enable Javascript in order to access to this story.

Tech titans

Africa’s Top 50 digital champions 2022

For the second year in a row, The Africa Report and Jeune Afrique are publishing an exclusive ranking of the 50 people that are leading the continent's digital revolution. In order to give more visibility to these tech champions, we decided to shake things up by dividing our ranking into three parts.

Tech Champions

Appointed chief of the multinational in Africa just before the Covid-19 pandemic, 43-year-old Gajria has not been able to travel the continent the way he would have liked. In March, he made one of his first official trips to Lomé to mark, with the Togolese government, the landing of the Equiano submarine cable.

Tech Champions

‘We’ve done the heavy lifting,’ says Cassava Technologies’ Hardy Pemhiwa

For Liquid Intelligent Technologies (#167), the pandemic has produced yet another example of Africa leapfrogging. “We saw a five-times increase in data throughput,” says Hardy Pemhiwa, the chief executive of Liquid’s holding company, Cassava Technologies, recalling the huge demands suddenly placed on its vast fibre-optic network on the continent in 2020. Many companies were forced to digitalise to survive.

Tech Champions

Cybercrime: African business leaders need to change their outlooks and approaches

The deployment of digital technologies in Africa has grown dramatically over the past two decades. The internet penetration rate, which was less than 1% of the population in the 2000s according to the World Bank, has now reached 43.2% (Internet World Stats, 2021), including 25% of users connected every day.