Africa VC Forum 2025 - Report

Grounding growth, measuring scale, rebalancing capital.

Three key themes stood out at the flagship LVCN Africa VC Forum for 2025, kindly sponsored by Daedalus. Hosted at the Informa offices in London, over 120 attendees were joined by a unique combination of industry experts, innovators and entrepreneurs working across Africa. As investor sentiment for the continent cautiously turns optimistic, based on Q1 data for 2025, discussions held during the day revealed simultaneous changes in founder and investor attitudes that may accelerate this growth further. With the current state of the ecosystem looking well positioned for new investment, a roadmap for the future can be drawn from the three key themes we observed during the day.

Grounding growth

“It’s always helpful to partner with folks on the ground… always important to find someone who knows that market better than we do”

Emmanuel Adegboye, Madica

Successful ventures across Africa are increasingly defined by their depth of local insight, an often overlooked aspect of early stage startups that are otherwise looking to grow at any means possible. There are advantages to staying local, staying patient, and building up cultural fluency before expanding into other markets: while a “typical” venture-backed startup may overlook regional context in favour of gaining market share, the differences in business and cultural approaches between African countries make this difficult to replicate otherwise. 

“Do you have a good cultural understanding of how people do business and use solutions in this [specific African] country? If you don’t then clearly you shouldn’t be expanding into another region”

Samuel Ubido, Techinnovate Group

From this perspective, the importance of understanding the local region, the business practices, and the context of a growth strategy, cannot be overstated. Grounding the desire for growth with slow, but steady, expansion plans may appear counterintuitive at first for any startup, but is increasingly essential for success in Africa. The risks of diving into a new business territory and “outfunding the competition” are especially high when considering that venture capital across the continent is still relatively nascent, and access to capital is limited.

Measuring scalability

“Success doesn’t have to be a $1 billion dollar company… A $50 million dollar company, if you invested at $2.5 million, is still a success”

Gbite Oduneye, ODBA

Supporting the theme of grounding growth, speakers throughout the day challenged a common belief that only outsized scale leads to success within a venture portfolio. Staying regionally grounded and using capital efficiently aligns more with the realities of infrastructure challenges, market fragmentation and cross-border regulations that a startup has to wrestle with. Naturally, this leads to a shift in perspective for measuring what success means on the continent: not a matter of rapid growth and push for scale, but instead a more deliberate approach to understand the market, and strategically timing for exits at reasonable multiples. As mentioned, the ecosystem for venture funding is still developing across Africa, and demanding billion dollar outcomes at the “growth stage” holds back innovation and drive for entrepreneurship. Capital is still cycling slowly: this presents unique challenges that require investors to appreciate the nuances of measuring traction in this context.

“With any new technology, the technology is only as good as its use case.”

Felix Ochefu, Kahana

Scalability is usually considered to be the business of building quickly, but as considered previously, building appropriately becomes even more critical for startups in Africa. With recent developments in generative AI creating a surge of new “AI enhanced” startups globally, both founders and investors need to consider the practical role such technologies can actually take. Drawing on his experience building Kahana, Ochefu reflected that when faced with challenges of access to other markets, this could in fact be a way to force focus onto product-market fit. Use cases in one region may look completely different in neighbouring countries, so the question of scalability must also address a concrete use case for the product, independent (ideally) from the region. Coming back to traction, we see that depth becomes the obvious contender to breadth: serving a singular market exceptionally well may be a stronger signal of long-term success than how quickly that market can be expanded.

Rebalancing capital

“We do make a concerted effort to invest out of the Big Four… last year we did Cameroon, Côte d’Ivoire, Togo, countries we hadn’t invested in before.”

Niama El Bassunie, Baobab Network

The dominance of the “Big Four” (Nigeria, Kenya, Egypt and South Africa) as targets for venture funding in Africa had increasingly been seen as a self-perpetuating inevitability. With their capable infrastructure, relatively large markets, and established business hubs, there was a natural pull of entrepreneurs to the regions. This concentrated early-stage capital allocation as investors followed other successful funding playbooks in the Big Four, but potentially at a high opportunity cost to other countries in Africa. From Albasuni’s efforts at Baobab, to other new and established VCs in the region, the data and sentiment shows intentional rebalancing of capital to new areas. With less market saturation and more support from policy makers to promote innovation, we saw from David Saunders’ presentation that Tunisia, Ghana, Rwanda and elsewhere are now picking up more deals, at higher valuations than before. 

“We’re starting to see more conviction in sectors like logistics, AI and climate… fintech is still strong, but there’s more range in what people are willing to back.”

Nonnie Wanjihia Burbidge, Enza Capital

Not only is capital rebalancing geographically, but we also see growing investment into verticals beyond fintech. While fintech has played a foundational role in shaping the African startup ecosystem, the dominance has been largely structural. There were real gaps in payment infrastructure and digital financial access that dovetailed very well with traditional VC metrics for scale, traction and profitability. But as crowding and competition increases in African financial technology startups, opportunities for other sectors become progressively more attractive. With continued improvements in infrastructure, policy and access to talent across the continent, there are incentives not only pushing entrepreneurs from fintech to other ventures, but also the pulling forces of a considerably friendlier business ecosystem. 

With thanks to our sponsors, speakers, and attendees, we’ve seen a glimpse into the future of Africa’s venture ecosystem. As the ecosystem settles into a new phase, founders are building with renewed focus and stronger domestic support, while more investors are entering the continent with a clearer sense of where and how to back innovation. Capital is spreading intentionally, deliberately, and with a steady pace across new sectors and geographies. What comes next will be less scale, for the sake of scale itself, but cultural fit, widening access to opportunities, and growing Africa through innovation.