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African startups raised $174 million in January 2026, trailing last year’s tally by $102 million and well below the 12-month monthly average of $263 million, according to Africa: The Big Deal, a monthly funding tracker. While a month-on-month dip from December to January is routine in African venture capital (VC), what stands out this January is how few startups raised money, with only 26 startups raising above $100,000, just over half the recent monthly average and the lowest January tally since at least 2020. The data reveals how narrow Africa’s VC funnel has become and how unforgiving the path ahead may be for African startup funding. Over a third of the month’s funding went to Egypt’s lending startup, valU, which raised $63 million in debt from a local bank. Nigeria’s MAX, a vehicle financing startup, followed with $24 million in a mix of equity and asset-backed financing. The two transactions accounted for half of all capital deployed in January. Neither deal reflects risk-seeking venture capital, as they are structured around lending books, assets, and predictable cash flows. Instead, they emphasise a pattern of investor comfort with revenue and collateral and a clear unease with uncertainty, the very condition that defines early-stage startups and venture capital. “After a decade of asset-light evangelism, 2026 will mark the return of the balance sheet as a competitive advantage,” Olivia Gao, a principal at Verod-Kepple Africa Ventures (VKAV), a growth-stage VC firm, told TechCabal. “Startups that own or finance productive assets—vehicles, devices, and equipment—will outcompete pure marketplaces by controlling supply, monetising financing margins, and unlocking private credit partnerships,” she added. Nearly 40% of African startup funding now comes from local investors What does this mean for African startup funding If you strip out those two rounds, January looks very different. There was very limited equity activity, few first-time raises, and almost no early-stage momentum. The month reflects a deeper problem in African VC as the industry drifts toward safety. In the search for predictable returns, many firms are backing proven, familiar business models, with little appetite for riskier bets. African startup funding is beginning to look more like credit underwriting than long-term experimentation. This shift compounds an existing funnel problem in African tech. Many early-stage startups are already stuck in a capital valley, unable to raise growth-stage funding. If risk aversion now seeps further downstream, into pre-seed and seed investing, the damage will surface in 18 to 36 months. Fewer companies will have been funded, even fewer will reach Series A readiness, and exits will become scarcer, shrinking the ecosystem over time. As capital becomes more conservative, founders will be forced to optimise for early cash generation and focus on smaller, local markets, where expansion costs are lower. While this may produce leaner, more disciplined, and more profitable businesses, it also narrows the pool of venture-scale bets that deliver outsized outcomes and define a thriving startup ecosystem. It can be tempting to frame this shift as rational adaptation. Inflation is high, exits are scarce, and as the life cycle of funds ends, limited partners are demanding returns. Some African investors can argue that investing in asset-backed, cash-flow-driven models is a rational adaptation to these macro conditions and not a failure of imagination, but that thinking goes against what venture capital is. If this safety approach were prevalent during the boom of the early 2020s, startups like Paystack, Wave, and Moniepoint would likely never have raised their earliest institutional rounds. When safety becomes the organising principle of an emerging-markets risk capital, improvement at scale does not happen.
Read MoreNigeria’s telecom and financial regulators are moving to mandate 24-hour refunds for everyday airtime and data mistakes, from over-purchases to wrong-number transfers. The joint exposure draft released on Monday, by the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) and the Nigerian Communications Commission (NCC), seeks to fix long-standing consumer pain points around mistaken airtime and data purchases by replacing non-existent refund practices with clear rules, legal thresholds, and standardised timelines. For the first time, mobile network operators (MNOs), NCC-authorised licencees, and banks would be formally accountable for consumer errors such as wrong-number transfers and mistaken value purchases. Under the framework, the overpurchase of airtime and data by a subscriber will be reversed within 24 hours after a complaint is lodged. For airtime or data sent to the wrong phone number, the framework introduces value-based thresholds. Transactions of ₦20,000 ($14.64) and above will require an affidavit of indemnity or a notarised indemnity letter before reversal is processed, while smaller transactions between ₦1,000 ($0.73) and ₦20,000 ($14.64) will depend on recipient consent, to be facilitated by the mobile network operators. The recovery timeline is set at 24 hours. In January, TechCabal reported that the CBN and NCC will introduce a new consumer protection framework that mandates near-instant refunds for failed airtime and data transactions, from March 1, 2026. The regulators, in a statement at the time, said subscribers who are debited without receiving value would be entitled to a refund within 30 seconds, a move aimed at addressing one of the most persistent complaints in Nigeria’s digital services ecosystem. The draft framework released on Monday expands on these efforts, which aim to address mistaken purchases and tackle rising consumer complaints around failed airtime and data transactions. “This development buttresses the need for the proposed framework to institutionalise clear accountability, standardise resolution timelines, and ensure a sustainable, coordinated approach to consumer redress across the financial and telecommunications ecosystems,” said Aisha Isa-Olatinwo, director, consumer protection and financial inclusion. If adopted, subscribers will be able to lodge complaints with either their bank or mobile network operator for refunds when they are debited without service delivery, wrong value purchases, or send airtime/data to the wrong number. The framework mandates banks and MNOs to create formal dispute resolution processes, document all claims, and process them within defined service-level timelines. For oversight, the regulators plan to introduce a central monitoring dashboard for tracking reversals, SLA breaches, and customer complaints. “This will facilitate the establishment of a real-time national “Failed Transactions Dashboard” with uniform error code, with end-to-end visibility across the value chain,” the document read. When disputes remain unresolved after five working days, subscribers can escalate them to the CBN and NCC. If adopted, the framework would expand consumer rights for millions of Nigerians who rely on digital channels for airtime and data purchases.
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Driving through the Egyptian desert along the Red Sea, hotspotting a MacBook while typing reports in the back seat because being offline for a three-hour flight is a luxury that a risk analyst cannot afford. Other times, it’s realising that Kizomba, a dance you once learned in the vibrant streets of Dakar, Senegal, somehow exists in different forms across the continent and is a gateway to connecting with people in communities as you travel. This is the life of Maya Hautefeuille. In one decade, she’s a photojournalist in the Middle East, documenting the Syrian revolution and the aftermath of the Arab Spring. In the next, she is a senior analyst, uncovering the intersection of politics and economics within African countries for 14 NORTH, a company providing insights and business intelligence for Africa’s frontier and emerging markets. Staying close to communities in what Hautefeuille labels as being ‘on the ground’ has helped her realise that places that are very misunderstood from the outside. “I like to make sense of places [and] help people make better decisions ultimately,” she said. “Maybe that came across in how I was raised, and I grew up a bit mixed and all over the world.” Building bridges from Japanese classrooms to French social movements Born to an American-Japanese mother and a French father, Hautefeuille spent most of the first decade of her life in Japan, shaped by education from a school built to overcome the trauma of the Second World War, and under a curriculum imbued with peacemaking philosophies. According to Hautefeuille, the learning emphasis leaned towards students being good global citizens, as opposed to a strong micro-focus on being nationalistic to their respective countries. “There’s nowhere else on earth where they taught [me] those things and made it as though it should be your life mission to be a good citizen of wherever you are and build your bridges,” she said. Hautefeuille would later live out what it meant to be a global citizen, moving to the United States when she was 10, then a year later to France, and eventually Australia and across Asia. She spent her late teens in her home country, France, where she observed the country punctuated by social movements and protests. “I was very into politics and questions of power…and inspired by movements that claimed to be about liberation,” she said. Being ‘on the ground’ in France also fuelled Hautefeuille’s interest in Africa and the Middle East, specifically due to France’s historical relationship with North Africa, and post-colonial movements that had taken place in Africa. “If I hadn’t gone to France,” she admitted, “I wouldn’t have been able to see these things at a closer level.” And so, in 2007, Hautefeuille pursued a Bachelor’s in African studies at Columbia University in New York. She was only there for a year, but it was a turning point for how she viewed the world. Relearning power with Mahmood Mamdani Studying under professors like Mahmood Mamdani, an Indo-Ugandan anthropologist, academic, and political commentator, with whom she resonated because of his multicultural background, Hautefeuille was introduced to new ways of thinking about power and history. “I had one teacher who really impressed upon me,” she recalled. “The way he taught his theories is very different, and because he always brought an identity element [to his teachings], being an Indian-African and part of liberation movements.” However, in search of a school that she felt encompassed African studies more holistically, she transferred to the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) in London the next year. At SOAS, she learned Swahili and Arabic, regarding language as the crucial infrastructure for understanding the Indian Ocean trade, which linked East African city-states to Middle Eastern countries such as Arabia and Persia. Before her master’s program, between 2008 and 2009, Hautefeuille had hitchhiked without public transportation or a personal vehicle from France to Touba, the spiritual capital of Senegal, travelling through Spain, Morocco and Mauritania. That early, gritty immersion to study the Mouridiya Sufi brotherhood, an Islamic order, served as her first experience with the country, and it was not an easy journey. “[I stayed] with Senegal families whose life revolved around that holy city, the mosque, the rituals, the sharing of food, the cooking of the food, the greeting of the marabus. It was like a very regulated lifestyle around the mosque.” After completing her studies in 2011, she began her master’s at the same school in the same year till 2012, but this time in Middle Eastern studies. While her degree was within the Middle Eastern studies department, her focus remained firmly on West Africa. Hautefeuille was drawn to the program for a very specific reason: the study of Senegalese religious movements. Her field ‘’Anthropology/Sociology of Religions’’ was hosted in that department, and she intended to study Senegalese Sufi movements through that lens. After she completed her master’s, Hautefeuille moved to East Jerusalem for a post-graduate research internship in a British/Palestinian studies centre. It was a period in the Middle East that marked the beginning of her photojournalism. Hautefeuille in East Jerusalem. Image Source: Maya Hautefeuille From late 2013 to 2018, Hautefeuille was based on the Turkish-Syrian border, sometimes in Palestine, in Lebanon, where she strengthened her command of Arabic, all the while documenting migration and hospital bombings as a freelance photojournalist and advocate. Hautefeuille photographed for Al Jazeera and Danwatch. Her interest in photojournalism stemmed from the urge to document and understand the relationship between power, people, and identity. “In conflict, you’re seeing really impactful things, and I had had an urge to document that,” she said. “So I started with journalism.” But as December 2018 closed in, while Hautefeuille continued advocacy work on Syria, she began feeling professional fatigue as the conflict stalled. And soon, she was yearning for the life she had once experienced in Senegal once more. Trading rituals of the Touba for the rhythm of Dakar By April 2019, Hautefeuille returned to Senegal. But this time, to Dakar. Where she
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