Another great week for Nigeria, particularly Lagos State as it displaced Nairobi to become Africa’s top startup city.
During the week, Nigeria also stunned the world by claiming 5 slots of 10 in the new Africa Startup Initiative Programme cohort.
Unfortunately, however, Nigeria wasn’t lucky enough on equity raiser points as most of the rounds we were able to track was dominated by startups from Kenya, Ethiopia, Ghana and Egypt.
Let’s discuss.
Big win
During the week, Africa Startup Initiative Programme, ASIP, unveiled its new cohort, comprising of five Nigerian startup from a pack of a total of 10startups for its forthcoming cohort. This goes on to further attest to the dominating spirit of major Nigerian startups.
According to ASIP, the finalists, emerged from an intensive two-day selection process of 20 semi-finalists.
Making Nigeria proud, the five startups from Nigeria included Agrodata, AGS Tribe, NucleusIS, Ustacky, and Worldbay Technologies while other featuring startups include ventures from Cameroon, Gbana, Zimbabwe, Kenya and Zambia.
A week with no equity raiser
In recent weeks, we recorded no raiser on the Nigerian slate. And, while there were news for other countries, Nigeria fell flat on the bottom line.
While Nigerian startups missed out during the week, HyperionDev, a Cape Town-headquartered ed-tech startup, raised ZAR50 million (US$3.5 million) in Series A funding.
Also, Apollo Agriculture, a Kenyan agri-tech startup, closed US$1 million in debt funding from the Agri-Business Capital Fund (ABC Fund).
Again, Nigeria missed out on another opportunity as Villgro Africa disbursed $170k funding to 4 health-focused startups.
While these startups are not anything different from most of the countries health tech firms, it remains a shock that Nigeria did not feature.
Going by the list published by the VC, two of the newly funded startups were Kenya-based while the two other startups were shared between Ethiopian and Ugandan.
Breaking new record
The highlight of the week was the new record set by Lagos State, taking over from Kenya’s Nairobi as Africa’s top startup city.
Now ranked 122nd globally, the city took over from Nairobi which now ranks 136 globally.
Is Nigeria not missing?
Amber Group, a Hong Kong-based cryptocurrency trading startup closed a $100 million Series B funding round, calling concerned crypto investors in Nigeria to again decry the current ban placed on the digital commodity by the country’s apex bank.
For the company, the new funding took its portfolio to a pre-money valuation of $1 billion.
This development stood out for the company to the admiration of international crypto players.