For African startups, this year has been a massive success. Not only have some startups received more than $100 million, but Africa has also garnered investment from well-known investors such as Softbank, a Japanese firm that has invested in Alibaba, Uber, and other well-known companies.
Prior to 2021, only two African startups had ever received $100 million in a single round before this year: Andela, and OPay in 2019. In Africa, such substantial raises are obviously uncommon.
According to The Big Deal, a startup fundraising database, the $100 million deals closed by 11 African startups were worth over $1.7 billion, accounting for more than 40% of the $4.2 billion raised by African startups this year.
Here is a list of Nigerian startups that raised above $100 million in 2021
Opay: OPay, a fintech company focusing on Africa raised $400 million in a fresh round of funding. According to Bloomberg, SoftBank Vision Fund 2 led this fundraising round, which valued the company at $2 billion.
Opay claimed to handle around 80% of bank transfers among Nigerian mobile money providers and 20% of non-merchant point-of-sale transactions.
Andela: Andela, a global tech recruiting company that helps companies develop remote engineering teams, raised $200 million in Series E funding at a valuation of $1.5 billion. Softbank Vision Fund 2, the venture capital arm of the Japanese company SoftBank, led the investment round.
Engineers from over 80 countries spanning six continents currently work for the company. Andela has helped thousands of engineers get jobs with prominent tech companies like GitHub, Cloudflare, and ViacomCBS.
Flutterwave: Flutterwave, an African payments company raised $170 million in a Series C round, putting the company at over $1 billion. Avenir Growth Capital, located in New York, and Tiger Global, a hedge fund and investment firm based in the United States, led the capital round.
Flutterwave noted that over 290,000 companies utilize its platform to make payments in 150 currencies using a variety of payment methods, including local and international cards, mobile wallets, bank transfers, and Flutterwave Barter.
Tradedepot: TradeDepot, Africa’s premier B2B eCommerce and embedded finance platform secured $110 million in an equity and debt investment round to enable the delivery of Buy-Now-Pay-Later services to 5 million small and medium-sized businesses and to expand its merchant platform throughout the continent. The International Finance Corporation (IFC), a member of the World Bank Group, led the Series B equity investment.
The new funding will speed up the distribution of this service to more merchants, enhancing consumer goods brand penetration and driving prosperity in one of Africa’s most important industries.
