A new report suggests that venture capital (VC) investment in Africa will hit an all-time high in 2021 and beyond.
According to Disrupt Africa and Partech — who released separate, independent studies confirming the findings — investments in Africa in 2015 alone fell somewhere between $186 million and $277 million.
And while, certainly, that’s nothing to sneeze at, it pales in comparison to the investment of a company like Snapchat, which raised $500 million in its initial funding round (which happened that same year).
The disparity in funding between white-owned and Black-owned companies, at this point, is self-evident and is frequently discussed by AfroTech. However, there’s an additional disparity to be addressed, as well: the disparity between VC investment in Black-owned companies and African companies.
And this disparity, according to Disrupt Africa and Partech’s newest report, has begun closing in recent years.
Consider the case of African companies in 2019, which raised a collective $2.02 billion in 2019 alone. When considered over the course of 250 funding rounds, that number is pretty impressive.
And while VC funding in Africa was expected to grow, exponentially, in 2020 and beyond, the COVID-19 pandemic sidelined many investors’ plans. That said, the 2020 VC investment in the African continent still clocked in between $1.2 billion and $1.8 billion.
As of May 2021, investment in the African continent is at about $800 million, according to Maxime Bayen, deal tracker and senior venture builder at BFA Global. Bayen also projects that 2021 will be a banner year for VC investment in the African continent.
“We expect an extremely strong acceleration of deals from seed to Series B as well as major growth deals, together with some IPOs (Nigeria’s Interswitch, for example), that will propel deal activity to never seen before levels of activity. As of April 2020, our forecast for 2021 ranged from under $1.6 billion to over $3 billion,” Bayen said in the published report.
