African startups raised a sum of $4.65 billion in funding in 2021, despite the effect of the pandemic on world economies, surpassing its record in previous years.

This is contained in a report titled Africa Investment report released by Briter Bridges.

According to the report, financial technology companies accounted for 62% of the total funds raised in the reference period, with the health and biotech sector being a distant second with 8%, while logistics companies accounted for 7% of the total.

The report also highlighted that there were more than 740 announced deals in the review period, which is 2.5 times more than what was recorded in the record year of 2019. Also, at least 6% of the total funding were in form of debt financing.

A further look at the report shows that Nigerian accounts for most of the deals, with South Africa and Kenya following in that order.

It was revealed that Nigerian startups raised over $1.6 billion in funding in 2021, with the likes of OPay, Chipper Cash, and Andela being at the forefront of the announced deals.

In the same manner, the Briter Bridges report also listed OPay, Chipper Cash, ZEPZ, Trade Depot, Zipline, Andela, Tala among a list of companies that raised over $100 million in single rounds in 2021.

Also, in 2021 Africa’s startup M&A market, despite being almost twice as active as the previous year with 33 acquisitions as against 17 deals reported in 2020, accounted for a smaller proportion of total capital inflows compared to the previous year.

In 2020, almost 50% of investments consisted of acquisitions, for example, WorldRemit’s deal with Wave, the acquisition of Pay stack by Stipe. However, there were reports of the acquisition of Nigerian Mainone by Euinix towards the end of 2021.