Skip to main content

Rising African venture investment powers fintech, cleantech bets in 2020

As a turbulent week in the capital world, we’re taking a look at something a bit slower-moving: venture capital trends in Africa during 2020.

The Exchange has long explored quarterly and yearly data regarding the North American, European and Asian venture capital markets, along with data on particular startup categories. From today, we’ll also provide regular examinations of what’s happening in Africa.

As an aside, we’re sorry The Exchange didn’t come out yesterday. The world went mad and we had to tend to breaking news. We’re back! 

To dig into African venture capital results, we’re looking at a report concerning 2020 data from Briter Bridges, a research group that focuses on the continent’s private capital market. The Exchange also interviewed report author and Briter director Dario Giuliani about the collected data.


The Exchange explores startups, markets and money. Read it every morning on Extra Crunch, or get The Exchange newsletter every Saturday.


What emerges is a generally growing venture capital scene, but one that had mixed results in 2020 compared to 2019. However, if we control for an outsized investment or two, things smooth out rather nicely.

Let’s check the top-line figures, get insight from Giuliani concerning where the capital is flowing most rapidly, and wrap with a look at which startup categories are seeing the most investment in Africa today.

Africa’s 2020 venture capital results

During my time at Crunchbase News, I helped lead a team that generated acre-feet of reporting on the global and domestic venture capital markets. It’s difficult work that involves making decisions on what counts, what doesn’t and how to handle rounds that have not been disclosed publicly.

Over time, I’ve also become comfortable with venture data from PitchBook and CB Insights as well, and am now adding the Briter dataset to the trusted cohort.

During my chat with Giuliani, it became clear that his team is doing the hard and valuable work of carefully collating and sorting information. I say all of that simply to let you know that we now have a regular source for trustworthy information (compiled in concert with seventy different investing groups) on Africa that we’ll use regularly to keep tabs on the continent. This is a win.

So, what does the data say? We have to parse it some, as historically Briter has collated mega-deals — which it counts as investments of $90 million or more — and M&A in the same bucket. So, tracking just the dollar volume of African deals smaller than $90 million gives us the following set of results:



from TechCrunch https://ift.tt/3pvZ1Iu
via IFTTT

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Max Q: Psyche(d)

In this issue: SpaceX launches NASA asteroid mission, news from Relativity Space and more. © 2023 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only. from TechCrunch https://ift.tt/h6Kjrde via IFTTT

Max Q: Anomalous

Hello and welcome back to Max Q! Last week wasn’t the most successful for spaceflight missions. We’ll get into that a bit more below. In this issue: First up, a botched launch from Virgin Orbit… …followed by one from ABL Space Systems News from Rocket Lab, World View and more Virgin Orbit’s botched launch highlights shaky financial future After Virgin Orbit’s launch failure last Monday, during which the mission experienced an  “anomaly” that prevented the rocket from reaching orbit, I went back over the company’s financials — and things aren’t looking good. For Virgin Orbit, this year has likely been completely turned on its head. The company was aiming for three launches this year, but everything will remain grounded until the cause of the anomaly has been identified and resolved. It’s unclear how long that will take, but likely at least three months. Add this delay to Virgin’s dwindling cash reserves and you have a foundation that’s suddenly much shakier than before. ...

What’s Stripe’s deal?

Welcome to  The Interchange ! If you received this in your inbox, thank you for signing up and your vote of confidence. If you’re reading this as a post on our site, sign up  here  so you can receive it directly in the future. Every week, I’ll take a look at the hottest fintech news of the previous week. This will include everything from funding rounds to trends to an analysis of a particular space to hot takes on a particular company or phenomenon. There’s a lot of fintech news out there and it’s my job to stay on top of it — and make sense of it — so you can stay in the know. —  Mary Ann Stripe eyes exit, reportedly tried raising at a lower valuation The big news in fintech this week revolved around payments giant Stripe . On January 26, my Equity Podcast co-host and overall amazingly talented reporter Natasha Mascarenhas and I teamed up to write about how Stripe had set a 12-month deadline for itself to go public, either through a direct listing or by pursuin...