Why Africa Didn’t Have a Unicorn Last Year Despite Record Fundraising • TechCrunch

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Bucking global trends, Africa has raised more VC dollars in 2022 than in 2021. But its unicorn list has stalled.

African technology In the year In 2021, the show met with fans: venture capital investments in the region totaled $4 billion to $5 billion and produced five unicorns. In my post outlining this development, I predicted that there would be more unicorns by 2022. Those predictions proved to be wrong by the end of the year.

Data from market insights watchdogs Briter Bridges and The Big Deal show that funding raised by African startups in 2018 More than $5 billion by 2022 (including undisclosed deals) – a small percentage increase from 2021 figures. However, no unicorns appeared for the entire year, compared to five in 2021.

That fact may seem insignificant because at the end of the day, personal assumptions don’t pass the proper test until startups go public. However, the failure to produce unicorns despite raising large amounts of venture capital suggests that it is perhaps too early to assume that African markets are mature enough to consistently emerge private billion-dollar companies like their Global South counterparts: India, Southeast Asia and Latin America.

That, 2022 was special. The global economic downturn and capital collapse ensured that every region produced fewer billion dollar companies than last year. Globally, 216 Unicorns will be produced by Tracxn in 2022, compared to 541 last year. In India, 22 companies became unicorns last year, compared to 46 in 2021. In Latin America, 18 companies became unicorns in 2021, a figure that dropped to eight last year.

Unlike Africa, these regions They raised less venture capital in 2022 than in 2021, so it makes sense that their number of unicorns would decrease. For example, in India, VC activity has dropped by 33%, while the number of unicorns has more than halved. Latin America and Southeast Asia also saw double-digit declines in VC funding last year compared to 2021, though the fall of unicorns will show more damage.

So what happened in Africa in 2022… wonder?

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