This Thursday, we shall release the Digest Africa INDEX, an annual report that summarises Africa's technology investment landscape. As a build-up to the day, we shall release snippets of what is contained in the report. In this article, we look at the 50 most funded tech companies in Africa in the past year.
Throughout 2018, we tracked 454 funding and M&A deals of which 344 were disclosed. These generated $1.19 billion in deal value with funding raised by tech companies contributing 57% of that.
However, the 50 most funded companies in 2018 - with $618 million - contributed 90% of the $686.4 million total funding. The most funded company on the list is Tanzania's Zola Electric with $107.5 million. Please note that when recording funding, we include debt financing, grants/non-equity assistance, venture capital, angel investment, initial coin offerings, crowdfunding and corporate financing.
Also read: These are the 50 African startups to watch in 2019
For this particular list, we only included companies that raised at least $2 million in total funding. That is why the number of total companies on the infographic is 51 because there were multiple companies with $2 million in total funding raised.
On the infographic, the companies are classified under four groupings; $2-4.99M, $5-9.99M, $10-19.99M and $20M+. There were seven companies that raised $20 million plus with an aggregate total of $346 million. From $10 million to $20 million, there were 9 companies with an aggregate amount of $111 million.
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Zola Electric was the most funded company with $107.5 million.[/caption]
Please note that a couple of deals that others could have included on this list are missing partly because of our methodology or because they were classified under M&A. For example, we put Webuycar's $94 million under M&A.
At Digest Africa, we only focus on for-profit technology (and innovative) companies across Africa. Although we may once in a while write about non-tech companies - like Cipla QCL's IPO in 2018 - we do not include them in our reports. That's why we never included Africa Leadership Academy ($30.8M), iSON Xperiences ($51.0M) and Alten Africa ($36.0M).
Additionally, we only focus on companies that are headquartered in Africa. If they are not, then they should have Africa as either their primary or only market. That is why funding raised by companies; Branch ($20.0M), Tala ($65.0M) and D.Light ($116.0M), wasn't included.
Update: We adjusted the total funding raised from $684 million to $686.4 million after some of the companies we had reached out to earlier confirmed raising funding. This also took the total number of deals to 454 from 448 as we had earlier written here.