Which Startup Will Be North Africa’s Next Unicorn?: The Race To A Billion-Dollar Valuation
If you look back just a few years, Africa’s startup scene was more about dreams than deals. Investors spoke of untapped potential, of a market waiting to be unlocked, but billion-dollar companies? It was a distant ambition. Venture capital was scarce, digital adoption was shaky, and the startup scene barely registered on the radar of global investors.
In under a decade, the continent has gone from attracting a few hundred million dollars in venture funding to producing nine unicorns, privately held tech companies valued at USD 1 B or more. Flutterwave and OPay in Nigeria, Wave in Senegal, and Tyme in South Africa have all become proof points that African startups can scale globally and compete at the highest level.
But as the unicorn count increases, the rise has not been evenly spread. The rise of unicorns has been concentrated in the West and Southern Africa, leaving North Africa with something to prove. Despite its talent, capital inflows, and strategic location, the region has not quite produced unicorns at the same pace. The imbalance raises an important question: will the next unicorn come from the northern corner of the continent, and how soon?
Unicorns In The Broader African Context
The momentum we’ve seen with unicorns emerging across the continent is backed by remarkable growth in Africa’s startup ecosystem over the past decade. From being viewed as a region with untapped potential to becoming one that now delivers results, Africa has turned proof points into billion-dollar companies.
Much of this transformation has been fueled by a funding environment that looks radically different today than it did a decade ago. In 2015, total venture capital flowing into African startups barely crossed USD 200 M. By 2021, that figure had surged to almost USD 5 B, according to Weetracker’s Decoding Venture Investments in Africa report. Amid a turbulent global funding climate, African startups slowed down to USD 2.07 B in 2023. The pace has softened further in 2025, but international investors now view the continent as a growth market too big to ignore.
Behind these numbers are entrepreneurs who didn’t just attract capital; they solved challenges unique to African markets. They built payment platforms where traditional banks couldn’t reach, e-commerce networks in regions underserved by formal retail, and digital services for millions of people long excluded from the global economy. The result has been a wave of companies that not only scale but fundamentally reshape daily life.
The combination of these two factors —a post-pandemic funding surge in Africa, coupled with a hunger for digital solutions that focus on solving friction points in everyday life—access to financial services, trust, delivery, price transparency, and access to goods—helped create some of the continent’s biggest enterprises.
These enterprises have emerged as a new class of billion-dollar companies called unicorns. The term “unicorn” was coined by Aileen Lee in 2013 to describe rare U.S. software startups achieving billion-dollar valuations and has since been adopted in the African continent.
Arriving at a billion-dollar valuation is a recognition of a viable business model. For African founders, it means proving you can operate at scale across markets, manage regulatory challenges, build infrastructure, and deliver products that resonate with users. It also often means having raised significant rounds, securing repeat funding, sometimes expanding cross-border, hiring talent, and setting up operations that endure the pressures of hypergrowth.
One of the very first proven ventures in Africa was Jumia, the e-commerce giant often dubbed “the Amazon of Africa.” Jumia reached a USD 1 B valuation in 2016 and listed on the New York Stock Exchange in 2019. Its path was unique, but it showed what was possible—and signaled that African startups could scale and attract world-class capital.
Since then, a healthy funding environment and a growing demand for digital solutions have driven a revolution that has led to the emergence of more unicorns facilitating commerce, payments, lending, logistics, or connecting informal economies to formal ones. The reason is simple: those are the friction points in everyday life.
Nigeria, in particular, has been a hotbed of unicorn activity, with startups like Interswitch, Flutterwave, and Moniepoint leading the charge.
But while West and Southern Africa have dominated the unicorn count, North Africa, despite being a funding magnet, has only managed to birth one unicorn.
State Of Unicorns In North Africa
As of 2025, Africa’s unicorn count stands at nine. These mostly include fintech powerhouses like Flutterwave, Interswitch, and OPay; companies solving payments, credit, and logistics challenges; and newer additions such as Nigeria’s Moniepoint and South Africa’s Tymebank. Moniepoint, for instance, secured its unicorn crown after raising USD 110 M in October 2024, pushing its valuation past USD 1 B despite a broader slowdown in startup funding that year.
However, while much of the public attention has focused on West Africa—Nigeria, especially—and Southern Africa, a shift is underway. North Africa is emerging, quietly and steadily, as a region capable not just of contributing to Africa’s unicorn roster but of producing its next ones.
Egypt, Morocco, Algeria, and Tunisia are emerging as one of the continent’s most promising startup regions, pulling funding than ever before.
The region also boasts some fundamentals that are hard to ignore: a large, youthful population; strategic proximity to both Europe and the Middle East; and a fast-growing digital economy. Notable Venture capital has poured into the region in recent years. For instance, Egypt is one of Africa’s big four and top three destinations for startup funding.
Yet the billion-dollar threshold seemed out of reach. Many North African startups scaled domestically, but the leap to a billion-dollar valuation has been rare. The first big, however, breakthrough came with MNT-Halan.
While West Africa produced fintech giants like Flutterwave and OPay earlier, North Africa waited longer for its first unicorn. Cairo-based MNT-Halan broke that barrier in early 2023. Born from the merger of microlender MNT and super-app Halan, it grew into a comprehensive financial services platform catering to the unbanked and underbanked.
Through its mobile app, MNT-Halan offers microloans, payroll lending, digital payments, and even e-commerce services. By 2023, the company had raised USD 260 M in fresh funding, which pushed its valuation above USD 1 B. Today, it serves more than 1.3 million active customers, has disbursed over USD 2 B in loans, and processes upwards of USD 50 M in monthly e-commerce transactions.
The MNT-Halan unicorn status served as proof of concept that North Africa could produce billion-dollar companies that scale rapidly, raise global capital, and solve deeply entrenched local problems. Unicorn activity in the region has, however, remained muted following its ascension.
Which naturally raises the question: since MNT-Halan kicked it off, who might be next?
The “Soonicorns” To Watch
Several North African startups are already being described as “soonicorns” companies on the cusp of hitting a billion-dollar valuation. Each has a strong case. They are raising large rounds, demonstrating traction, expanding beyond borders, and commanding attention from global and local investors alike.
If MNT-Halan was the proof, then the next unicorn(s) will be part of a cohort that is already showing strong signs of scaling, and Algeria’s Yassir is at the top of the list.
Yassir is often discussed in the same breath as MNT-Halan. As a “super-app” offering ride-hailing, payments/delivery, and perhaps financial services, Yassir’s all-in-one model is appealing. The ability to cross-leverage user behavior (one user needing ride-hailing today, food delivery tomorrow, and payments next week) gives it a stickiness that can help score high valuations.
With USD 150 M raised in a 2022 Series B led by Silicon Valley investors, the company has expanded rapidly across North Africa, Francophone Africa, and even parts of Europe. Its model mirrors Southeast Asia’s Grab or Gojek, positioning it as a strong contender.
Meanwhile, Egypt’s fintech infrastructure player Paymob represents the other pole of North Africa’s unicorn conversation. Paymob has become the quiet backbone of digital payments in the region, enabling more than 350,000 merchants to process transactions online and offline. As the region shifts toward cashless transactions, Paymob’s rails have been critical in making it possible. It also has a robust funding portfolio to push its agenda
In 2024, the company extended its Series B with an additional USD 22 M, bringing the round to USD 72 M and its total funding to more than USD 90 M. Backed by names such as PayPal Ventures, the EBRD, and British International Investment, Paymob has also reached profitability in its home market of Egypt. This is no small feat in an environment where many startups are still chasing growth at the expense of returns. Its trajectory points toward the kind of scale and sustainability that investors associate with unicorn potential.
Another compelling contender is MaxAB. In 2023, it executed what was described as the biggest tech merger in African history when it joined forces with Kenya’s Wasoko. Together, the companies built the continent’s largest network of informal retailers, serving over 450,000 merchants across North and East Africa. That reach gives MaxAB something unrivaled distribution in a fragmented retail landscape. The company still faces the challenge of proving profitability at scale, but its sheer footprint, combined with a pivot to fintech services like merchant credit, has positioned it as one of the strongest bets for the region’s next unicorn.
The unicorn race in North Africa is not limited to fintech and commerce. Egypt’s Nawy is showing that proptech can be just as disruptive. In a country where buying or selling property is notoriously complex and opaque, Nawy has built a digital platform that simplifies the process from end to end. In 2024, the company raised USD 75 M in one of the largest Series A rounds ever seen in African proptech, led by Partech and joined by a roster of global investors including e& Capital and Shorooq Partners. That fresh capital pushed its Gross Merchandise Value to USD 1.4 B, underscoring how quickly the platform is gaining traction.
Beyond the Billion-Dollar Hype
Beyond the headline contenders, the North African ecosystem is rich with healthy ventures that could enter the unicorn conversation in the future. Morocco’s Chari, a B2B e-commerce and fintech platform, is expanding across Francophone Africa. Egypt’s Bosta is solving last-mile delivery challenges for the booming e-commerce sector. Healthtech startup Chefaa is digitizing pharmaceutical services, tapping into an underserved yet vital industry.
Another notable name is Tunisia’s InstaDeep, a deep-tech AI startup acquired by BioNTech for USD 549 M in 2023. While it didn’t become a unicorn in the strict sense, the deal underscored the region’s capacity to produce globally relevant innovation.
Taken together, these companies suggest that North Africa is no longer dependent on isolated success stories. It now has the depth and diversity needed to produce multiple billion-dollar players across sectors.
Recent Figures Suggest The Pressure is On
There are also strong funding numbers that show just how much pressure is building in the region to deliver the next billion-dollar story.
Egypt has become the undeniable anchor of that pressure for North Africa. Between January and May 2025, startups in Egypt raised over USD 330 M, roughly 31% of all the funding deployed across Africa in that period. That by itself marks a major concentration of investor expectations: when one country commands nearly a third of all continental capital, everyone begins to ask which company will carry that weight.
Morocco’s performance, while more modest in absolute size, adds further nuance to the picture. In 2024, the Moroccan startup ecosystem secured nearly USD 95 M.
Meanwhile, Tunisia is demonstrating significant ecosystem maturity, with one key deal pushing it into the top three most-funded MENA markets in June 2025. Even Algeria, though its deals are fewer, has already produced one of the continent’s most valuable tech companies, indicating that the pressure to scale is clearly distributed across the entire North African market.
Challenges That Must Be Navigated
While the surge of funding signals unprecedented maturity in North Africa’s tech ecosystem, it is important to look past the celebratory “unicorn-or-bust” narrative. The fixation on the unicorn metric borrowed from Silicon Valley can sometimes overshadow a more critical measure of sustainable profitability
This over-fixating on the “unicorn” narrative sometimes pushes companies to prioritize growth at all costs over sustainable profitability. A model that has been shown to be ill-suited for fragmented markets like Africa’s.
MaxAB’s current situation underscores the point. Its landmark merger with Wasoko created the largest network of informal retailers in Africa. But beneath the headlines, the real challenge remains turning scale into sustainable margins. Strategic pivots, tighter cost controls, and a clear path to cash flow will matter more in the long run than the size of its next fundraising round or unicorn milestone.
Besides, the optimism of a billion-dollar valuation doesn’t erase real risks. Scaling across North Africa means navigating multiple regulatory regimes, including different currencies, varying banking regulations, cross-border payments, and sometimes political instability and weaker infrastructure (power, internet). There is also an informal economy that remains large, which means many users lack trust in digital channels.
Add macroeconomic risks, including inflation, currency fluctuations (which can erode capital if you raise funds in dollars but spend in local currencies), import/export restrictions, and bureaucratic hurdles. Startups need resilience
And yet, perhaps the greatest pressure comes not from the market but from the investors themselves. When valuations rise rapidly, expectations rise as well. It is no longer enough to show rapid user growth. Investors demand stickiness, scalable monetization models, and retention rates that justify billion-dollar price tags.
Given all this, the next North African unicorn will carry a weight far beyond just its balance sheet.
From ‘One-Off To ‘Proven’
Despite the higher stakes and slowing funding environment, it’s reasonable to expect that in the next 12–24 months one or more of the soonicorns will cross the unicorn line. Potential names include mostly startups in Egypt that are already raising USD 50 M or more, as well as others in Algeria and Morocco with regional ambitions. Fintech remains the obvious candidate, but proptech, logistics, and even clean energy are emerging as serious contenders.
The conditions are lining up: rising funding, investor belief, visible success stories, growing local VC funds, and a maturing talent pool. The arrival of a second unicorn will confirm that MNT-Halan wasn’t a one-off. It will mark the region’s transition from “promising” to “proven.” And once that happens, the dominoes are likely to fall quickly. Investor confidence grows, founders aim higher, and ecosystems reinforce themselves.
When the next unicorn finally emerges here, it will not just be a prize for one startup, it will be a signal for all of North Africa that its time has come.
