By the middle of this year, Tizeti believed it was finally within touching distance of becoming Nigeria’s first venture-backed internet startup to list on the Nigerian Exchange.
The Y Combinator-backed broadband provider had spent months working with regulators, issuing houses, auditors and tax advisers, securing a conditional approval-in-principle from the NGX and preparing the dense bundle of legal and financial documentation required to convert its Nigerian unit, Tizeti Network Limited, into a public company.
Then the process stalled.
According to an internal update circulated to stakeholders and seen by Launch Base Africa, the final prerequisite — formal approval from the company’s Series A lead investor, 4DX Ventures, to complete the conversion to a public company — was delayed for more than five weeks. That pushed the transaction past regulatory deadlines linked to the validity window of its financial statements, forcing Tizeti to shelve the IPO for now.
“Given the fixed timelines attached to the approval in principle and the validity window of the financial statements, we made the decision to shift the IPO,” the company said. “None of the work done is lost. We can leverage the substantial progress already made and file in the future.”
The pause is more than a corporate inconvenience. For Nigeria’s capital markets, which have spent the last three years trying to persuade startups to list locally, it is another reminder that the path from venture capital to domestic public markets is still riddled with friction.
A test case for the NGX
Founded in 2013 by Kendall Ananyi and Ifeanyi Okonkwo, Tizeti built its reputation by offering unlimited, uncapped broadband using solar-powered towers and capacity leased from undersea cable operators. It now operates in Nigeria, Ghana, Togo and Côte d’Ivoire, and has raised about $7.4m from investors including Y Combinator, 4DX Ventures and Ventures Platform.
In 2018, the company reported $1.2m in revenue from 3,000 subscribers. By the end of 2023, its network was carrying more than 35 petabytes of data a year. More recently, it has pivoted from being a wireless ISP to rolling out fibre under its FreeFiber.Africa brand, with coverage completed across Lagos Island and construction under way on the mainland.
It was that operational shift — away from the capital-intensive, solar-tower model and towards urban fibre — that made the case for an NGX listing more compelling, according to people close to the company. Raising naira capital from local investors would also have reduced the pressure to deliver dollar-denominated venture returns in an economy battered by devaluation.
When Tizeti first announced its IPO ambitions in 2024, it was widely seen as a potential breakthrough. No venture-backed Nigerian tech startup has ever completed a domestic public offering. The NGX launched a dedicated Technology Board in 2022, but it has yet to host a single listing.
The structural problem
The reasons are not mysterious. A recent report by TLP Advisory, a Lagos-based venture law firm, found that 77% of Nigerian startups raise in dollars but earn in naira, creating a powerful incentive to seek offshore exits. More than half of founders surveyed said they were simply unaware of how to list on the NGX, while only 21% said they would seriously consider an IPO as an exit route.
Compliance costs, fears of undervaluation and limited liquidity also loom large. Nigeria’s stock market is small by global standards, with total market capitalisation of about $44bn. Dangote Cement, the most valuable company on the exchange, is worth roughly $5.4bn. By contrast, Flutterwave — Nigeria’s best-known fintech — was last valued privately at more than $3bn.
That mismatch makes domestic listings awkward for late-stage venture-backed firms whose cap tables are built for Silicon Valley, not Marina.
Beyond the boardroom drama, investors are increasingly wary of Nigeria’s pending 2026 tax regime — driven by the Nigeria Tax Act (NTA) 2025 — which threatens to triple Capital Gains Tax for large companies to 30% and introduce complex “exit tax” implications that could decimate returns on high-growth startups.
Africa is moving — Nigeria isn’t
The stalling of Tizeti’s IPO looks even starker when set against developments elsewhere on the continent.
In South Africa, fintech lender Optasia listed on the JSE in November at a valuation of around $1.4bn. In Egypt, buy-now-pay-later giant Valu was introduced to the EGX in June via a dividend distribution, placing a high-growth tech asset directly into the hands of retail investors. And in Morocco this month, money transfer operator Cash Plus was oversubscribed 65 times, attracting more than $5bn of demand for an $80m float.
Nigeria, by contrast, has produced no comparable domestic tech listing.
Flutterwave has hinted in recent months at a possible NGX IPO, after founder Olugbenga Agboola met President Bola Tinubu in Abuja to discuss listing locally. Yet Agboola has also said publicly that going public is “not an immediate goal” and that profitability must come first, underscoring how tentative those signals remain.
What Tizeti’s pause really means
Tizeti insists its decision to defer the IPO is procedural, not strategic. The fibre rollout continues, management says, and the company intends to return to the market once the paperwork is refreshed.
But the episode lays bare a deeper issue: Nigeria’s capital markets are still not aligned with the incentives of venture investors who control critical decisions at the final mile.
An IPO that depends on the timely consent of offshore funds, bound by their own return horizons and governance processes, is always going to be fragile. Until that tension is resolved — through better-informed founders, deeper local capital pools and investors willing to back domestic exits — Nigeria’s tech IPO pipeline will remain theoretical.
For now, the NGX’s most anticipated tech debut has joined a growing list of near-misses, leaving Africa’s largest startup ecosystem still waiting for its first true homegrown public listing.