Cape Town venture capital firm HAVAÍC has secured USD 25 M toward its USD 50 M African Innovation Fund 3, with major backing from financial services group Sanlam Multi-Manager. The fund targets 15 early-stage African tech startups with global potential, focusing on fintech, agritech and other high-growth sectors.

The investment marks Sanlam’s first significant move into South Africa’s VC space, joining existing backers Fireball Capital and the SA SME Fund. HAVAÍC has already deployed capital from the fund, including USD 1 M investments in SAPay (digitising taxi payments) and sports analytics platform Sportable. These join earlier 2025 investments in pan-African payments platform NjiaPay and livestock trading platform SwiftVEE.

The announcement follows several successful exits from HAVAÍC’s portfolio, most notably emergency response tech firm RapidDeploy’s acquisition by Motorola Solutions; one of South Africa’s largest tech exits. Another portfolio company, hearX Group, recently merged with hearing tech firm Eargo in a USD 100 M deal.

With its current portfolio already serving 22 million customers across 183 countries, HAVAÍC is positioning itself as a key player in Africa’s growing VC landscape. The firm plans to continue identifying and supporting African tech entrepreneurs building scalable solutions, with particular interest in businesses that can expand across multiple African markets and beyond. The remaining USD 25 M of the fund is expected to be raised in the coming months.

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Cape Town-based venture capital firm Knife Capital is marking its 15th anniversary with a pair of new Series A investments into South African startups Sticitt and Optique; two tech-driven businesses tackling entrenched problems in school payments and eye care.

Fintech startup Sticitt, founded in 2018 by Theo Kitshof, is digitising school payments while gamifying financial literacy for students. Its platform is used by over 75,000 users across 841 schools and has processed more than ZAR 6.3 B in transactions.

Beyond simplifying how parents pay for school services, the company, which previously raised seed funding in 2022, is positioning its youth banking tool as a driver of long-term financial inclusion. Knife’s investment builds on earlier backing via Grindstone Ventures, with this latest round intended to streamline the cap table and accelerate expansion.

Optique, launched in 2017, is challenging the traditional optometry model with a digitally enabled, low-cost offering. With 19 branches and an online store, the company targets under-served South Africans, offering ZAR 99.00 eye tests, all-inclusive pricing, and interest-free plans.

Founder Leon van Vuuren said the Knife backing will support national growth and bring world-class eye care to consumers left behind by legacy providers.

Knife Capital, which manages three funds, including the newly launched Knife Fund III, says these bets reflect a sharper focus on scalable, impact-driven innovation as it enters its next growth phase.

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Across markets in Dakar, the Senegalese capital, vendors used to lose nearly a tenth of their daily earnings just by accepting mobile payments. Every transfer from a customer came with a fee (sometimes 5%, even 10%) sliced away by the telecom companies that dominated Senegal’s mobile money market for nearly a decade. Then, in 2018, something changed.

A new player, Wave, arrived with a simple pitch: What if sending money cost almost nothing? And Senegal’s mass market quickly embraced this new order.

That promise—radically cheaper digital payments—has turned Wave into one of Africa’s most valuable startups. Now, with a fresh USD 137 M debt round led by Rand Merchant Bank (RMB) and backed by global development financiers, the company is doubling down on its mission: to make Africa the first cashless continent.

Wave’s rise reads like a playbook for how to disrupt a monopoly. Before its launch, mobile money in West Africa was controlled by telecom operators like Orange, which charged fees as high as 10% per transaction. For millions of small merchants and low-income users, those fees made digital payments more expensive than cash.

Then came Wave—no fees on deposits or withdrawals, just a flat 1% on transfers, with bill payments subsidised by businesses rather than customers. The model was so aggressively consumer-friendly that skeptics questioned its sustainability. Yet six years later, Wave is thriving.

Today, the company operates in eight West African countries, serving 20 million monthly active users through a network of 150,000 mobile money agents. In 2021, it became Francophone Africa’s first unicorn after a record-breaking USD 200 M Series A. Now, with this new funding, it’s eyeing further expansion into Central and East Africa.

The USD 137 M debt round—led by RMB and supported by British International Investment (BII), Norfund, and Finnfund—comes at a pivotal moment. Africa’s startup ecosystem has seen venture funding dip, but debt financing is emerging as an alternative, especially for companies like Wave that have provable scale and revenue.

For development financiers, the appeal is clear as Wave is well-positioned as a financial inclusion machine. “Wave’s platform is a clear example of technology enabling inclusive finance at scale,” said a representative from British International Investment. “This is aligned with our mandate to support digital infrastructure that empowers communities.”

Wave CEO and co-founder Drew Durbin said in a statement that the new “funding means we can help even more people by delivering the best possible product at the lowest possible price.”

“It brings us closer to our mission of making Africa the first cashless continent.”

The numbers back him up. In Senegal alone, Wave now processes more transactions than some traditional banks. And for two years running, it’s been the only African company on Y Combinator’s list of top 50 highest-earning startups.

Wave’s ambitions, however, face real obstacles. Regulators are watching closely as fintechs gain influence, and in some countries, telecom operators still hold political sway. Then there’s the sheer dominance of cash—90% of transactions in Africa are still offline, per World Bank data.

But if anyone can shift that balance, it might be Wave. After all, it’s already done the unthinkable once: making digital money cheaper than cash and accessible to everyone, not just the rich as in the past, while wrestling market share from telecom giants. Now, with fresh capital and a continent still ripe for disruption, it’s betting it can do it again at scale.

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Better Auth started in an Addis Ababa bedroom with a stubborn problem. Its founder, Bereket Engida, a self-taught developer, was tired of relying on expensive, opaque services like Auth0 and Firebase to handle the messy, critical job of user signups and logins.

So he built an open-source tool that lets developers embed customisable authentication directly into their own code — and kept all the data where it belonged, in their database.

Today, that tiny project has become one of the fastest-rising developer platforms out of Africa. After gaining 150,000 weekly downloads and 15,000 stars on GitHub, Better Auth has just announced a USD 5 M seed round led by Peak XV, with Y Combinator, Chapter One, and P1 Ventures also joining in. It’s the biggest bet yet on an Ethiopian founder tackling global developer infrastructure.

“This funding fuels the next phase of Better Auth,” reads the company’s announcement. “We wanted to prove that you can build global infrastructure out of Africa,” Engida said in an earlier interview with Addis Insight.

The appeal is obvious. In an era when cybersecurity and privacy concerns dominate, Better Auth is a shot across the bow of hosted services that treat user data like a commodity.

Its TypeScript-based framework gives developers a modular way to implement advanced sign-in, role-based access, and session management, making it ideal for early-stage AI startups and SaaS platforms that want to control their own data and save costs.

For Engida, a programmer who started coding after a friend declined to help him build an e‑commerce search tool, this went beyond making a better login as he set out to reshape an industry that treats access and authentication as a bottleneck.

Better Auth’s approach is rooted in a very specific frustration. “I remember needing an organisation feature. It’s a very common use case for most SaaS applications, but it wasn’t available from these providers,” Engida told TechCrunch.

“So I had to build it from scratch. It took me about two weeks, and I remember thinking, ‘This is crazy; there has to be a better way to solve this.’” So he started coding. And when he posted it to GitHub in September 2024, it quickly caught the attention of developers.

In six months, it went from a fledgling GitHub repo to a bustling library with a dedicated following of over 6,000 developers. Its open source core allows teams to self‑host or pick from plug‑and‑play enterprise add‑ons. That approach has started resonating far beyond its Ethiopian roots, making it the first African-led investment for Peak XV.

“Better Auth’s auth product has seen phenomenal adoption among the next generation of AI startups,” said Peak XV partner Arnav Sahu.

Fresh off a stint in Y Combinator, Engida and his co‑founder Kinfe Michael Tariku now have Silicon Valley backing and a global roadmap. The seed funding will help hire a small engineering team, deepen enterprise tooling, and build a seamless experience for developers wary of vendor lock‑in.

At a time when digital trust is under siege and the cost of relying on Big Tech platforms is rising, this Ethiopian upstart is making the case that the best foundation for a connected world can come from anywhere.

For Engida, it’s still early days. “There’s so much more to build,” the founders note. But in a global market tired of compromises, Better Auth may already be the right tool at the right time.

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MyNextCar (MNC), a key fleet enabler for Bolt in South Africa, has raised USD 10 M in its first institutional funding round—capital that could reshape the country’s low-cost ride-hailing landscape.

The investment, led by London-based Emso Asset Management with backing from Bolt, Assemble Capital, and E2 Investments, will help MNC scale its operations and roll out 1,500 new vehicles under Bolt Lite, a budget-focused category powered by the compact Bajaj Qute.

For Bolt and its partners, it’s a bet on a model that brings affordability, accessibility, and local relevance to South Africa’s mobility market.

Despite the success of Bolt Lite in pilot phases, the journey hasn’t been frictionless. Violent resistance from traditional taxi operators and illegal vehicle impoundments have made lenders wary.

This new funding signals renewed confidence in MNC’s ability to overcome those headwinds and validate an alternative future for urban transport.

To date, MNC has enabled over 700 drivers to earn on Bolt’s platform, with 43% of them being youth and 4% being women.

That demographic tilt is no coincidence. Both Bolt and MNC frame their partnership as part of a broader play to combat youth unemployment and expand financial inclusion via asset-light vehicle access. “This isn’t just about adding cars, it’s about changing lives,” a company spokesperson said.

The investment is also a vote of confidence from Emso, whose previous backing of Moove, a vehicle-financing startup for ride-hailing drivers, signals a growing interest in Africa’s mobility-fintech intersection. E2 Investments’ participation reinforces its impact-driven mandate to fund ventures that generate jobs in underserved segments.

By backing a business model built on small vehicles, lean economics, and broad access, the funders are effectively helping Bolt cement its presence in South Africa’s price-sensitive transport market.

With competition heating up and regulatory tensions still simmering, MNC’s next phase will test whether scale, impact, and margins can co-exist in the country’s rapidly evolving ride-hailing economy.

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Salus Cloud, a South African startup aiming to become the go-to DevOps platform for Africa’s developers, has raised USD 3.7 M in seed funding to accelerate product development and scale its presence across the continent.

The round was co-led by Atlantica Ventures and P1 Ventures, with backing from LoftyInc’s Idris Bello, Everywhere Ventures, and Essence VC’s Timothy Chen.

Built by Andrew Mori, also the founder of Deimos (one of Google Cloud’s largest partners in Africa), Salus Cloud wants to solve a stubborn but overlooked pain point in the continent’s tech stack: secure, scalable, affordable DevOps.

As more startups emerge across Africa, many are forced to either jury-rig insecure manual deployments or overpay for CI/CD tools built for Silicon Valley scale and pricing, neither of which suits the lean realities of African tech companies.

Salus Cloud offers an AI-native, developer-first platform that automates security fixes, simplifies software delivery, and packages it all at a price startups can actually afford.

Its self-service tier starts at USD 9.00 per developer, while its enterprise package, at USD 5 K per month, is pitched as cheaper than hiring one DevOps engineer in Lagos or Nairobi. Five enterprise clients are already onboard, with fintechs leading the early charge.

But the startup aims to go beyond cost-cutting, its founder emphasises, as the goal is to give African startups the infrastructure to move fast without breaking things, or budgets.

Mori says the goal is to support 50–500 enterprise teams and tens of thousands of developers by 2026. And unlike many imported tools, Salus is purpose-built for the continent’s realities, where connectivity is patchy, teams are small, and every dollar spent on tooling must show ROI.

This funding signals a broader shift in how investors are thinking about Africa’s tech ecosystem. The boom in startups is creating downstream demand for infrastructure: dev tools, cloud platforms, and scalable workflows that can handle hypergrowth without burning capital. Salus Cloud sits squarely in that opportunity space.

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Eighteen months ago, Karim Jouini and Jihed Othmani were ready to retire from startup life, fresh off a nine-figure exit.

Their expense management platform, Expensya, had just been acquired by Swedish fintech Medius in a deal reportedly worth over USD 120 M—one of Africa’s largest tech acquisitions made in Tunisia.

But the pull of generative AI and a nagging sense that they had unfinished business has drawn them back into the ring.

Their new startup, Thunder Code, has raised USD 9 M in seed funding to automate and rethink software testing from the ground up using generative AI.

Led by Silicon Badia, with participation from Janngo Capital, Titan Seed Fund, and strategic angels like Roxanne Varza of Station F and Karim Beguir of InstaDeep, the round includes familiar names from the Expensya era, some of whom are former employees turned investors.

Thunder Code is betting that quality assurance (QA), an often-overlooked but crucial bottleneck in software delivery, is ripe for reinvention.

The startup’s platform uses AI “agents” to autonomously understand apps, generate and execute tests, and catch bugs, promising to cut testing time by up to 90%.

In a world obsessed with shipping faster, it’s a pitch that’s already gaining traction with pilot programs in the U.S., France, Tunisia, and Canada.

Unlike Expensya, which took years to mature, Thunder Code shipped its MVP in just six weeks. “We’re moving 10x faster this time,” Jouini says, noting that the product today is already more robust than Expensya was in year four.

The founder emphasises that from day one, they have applied hard lessons: ship fast, hire top-tier talent early, and don’t be afraid of dilution if it buys speed and expertise.

Their timing is sharp. The global software testing market is projected to top USD 100 B by 2027, yet much of it still relies on clunky, code-heavy platforms.

Thunder Code joins a growing list of startups racing to modernise testing with AI, from incumbents like Tricentis to new entrants like Nova AI, but believes its execution speed and real-world traction give it a meaningful edge.

More than just a second act, Thunder Code feels like a startup born from unfinished ambition. “We promised not to do this again,” Jouini admits. “But the opportunity felt too big to ignore.”

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