When will the exits cross the road?

Written in collaboration with Osarumen of The Subtext

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The authors of this essay first met nine years ago during a weekend hangout at Hotels.ng. Derin worked there in finance, while Osarumen worked down the road at TechCabal. Just months earlier, Hotels.ng closed its $1.2M Series A from Omidyar Network & Echo VC–one of the biggest rounds in 2015, which made it one of the best-funded startups on the continent. What seemed monumental then doesn’t even merit a headline now.

According to data from Partech, African startups went from raising $320M in 2014 to peaking at $5B+ in 2021 (a nearly sixteen-fold increase in seven years). Like other tech ecosystems, the continent was flush with capital in the wake of the COVID pandemic. It’s been a rocky ride down, as the global venture ecosystem faces fundamental questions about the past few years. One question, in particular, has become more pressing in Africa: “Where are the exits?”

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We first addressed this in The Chicken or The Exit? (2021). Our premise was that venture capital ecosystems mature in phases and that the African ecosystem was still nascent. We argued it was too early to expect consistent liquidity until the ecosystem produced more mature companies:

In the three years after we wrote that essay, African tech brought in $12B of capital (2021 - 2023), roughly double the amount raised in the prior 11 years. During this period, the continent has generated only a handful of significant exits. This is not the case with other emerging venture ecosystems. During the recent peak, Latin America saw the IPOs of companies like Nubank & dLocal; South-East Asia had GoTo, Bukalapak, & Grab; in India, Zomato, Delhivery, Nykaa, PolicyBazaar & Paytm all went public in the same period. While these venture ecosystems are still maturing, they are clearly at different stages. Over the past decade, India has been the only major market to show consistent growth in public market listings. In 2024 alone, 12 startups, including seven technology firms, have gone public, according to PitchBook data cited by TechCrunch.

Where does this leave Africa? The chart from 2021 probably looks something like this today:

When a technology ecosystem generates hype, it is always followed by the expectation of increased liquidity. The hype comes