Nigeria currently hosts around 20 co-location data centers, mainly concentrated in Lagos, with the market led by Rack Center, Africa Data Centers, MDXi (Equinix), and MTN, which together account for more than 70% of the country's IT power capacity.
In 2009, Britain's venture capital market began producing some of the country's biggest technology companies, creating new billion-pound businesses and attracting billions of pounds in private investment. But for Black founders, very little of that capital made it through.
Britain has produced hundreds of technology companies valued at more than $1 billion, but very few have been founded by Black entrepreneurs. That scarcity is what makes the stories of Zepz and Marshmallow significant, well beyond the valuations attached to them.
African startups raised roughly $545 million in January 2023; by January 2024, that had fallen to $83 million, an 84.8% year-on-year collapse, even accounting for one outsized acquisition that turns the prior-year number.
For years, the first chapter of Africa’s fintech story was about getting people to pay digitally. The next chapter is increasingly about what happens after the payment.
Over the past few years, venture capital (VC) funding in Africa has been unevenly distributed among its 54 countries. The “Big Four” tech ecosystems—Kenya, Nigeria, Egypt, and South Africa—
The first half of 2024 has marked a challenging period for African tech startups, with venture capital (VC) funding hitting its lowest point since H2 2020, ($780 million) representing a 31% decline from the second half of 2023 and an even steeper 57% drop compared to H1 2023.
