African technology startups raised at least $1.21bn in disclosed funding across 151 deals in the first half of 2026, according to a Launch Base Africa tabulation of the period’s transactions. On its face, the deal count is close to the 159 logged in the same period a year earlier — evidence, some will argue, that the continent’s venture ecosystem has stabilised after several turbulent years.

The underlying data tell a less comfortable story. Disclosed dollar volume fell 17 per cent year-on-year, from roughly $1.45bn to $1.21bn. Debt has displaced equity as the fastest-growing instrument. A single company accounted for more than a quarter of all money raised. And the median deal size — the figure that describes what a typical founder actually secured, as opposed to what the market’s biggest winners secured — nearly halved.

What follows are seven findings from the H1 2026 dataset, set against the equivalent H1 2025 period, without the framing that funding round announcements typically arrive with.

1. Debt has displaced equity as the default instrument

Debt-labelled transactions — loans, bonds, commercial paper, securitisations and credit facilities — accounted for 36.7 per cent of disclosed H1 2026 capital, up from 18.5 per cent a year earlier. The number of debt deals nearly tripled, from nine to twenty-six. This shift reflects a market in which lenders are willing to underwrite predictable, asset-backed cash flows, while a smaller pool of investors is willing to underwrite unproven or early-stage unit economics. It is a rational response to risk, not evidence of a maturing equity market.

2. The e-mobility “boom” is a securitisation story

Mobility and e-mobility deals tripled, from seven in H1 2025 to twenty-one in H1 2026. The sector’s growth in deal count is disproportionately a debt phenomenon: Spiro, GoCab, MAX and Roam all raised through asset-backed lending structures secured against motorcycles, batteries, vehicles or receivables. The apparent surge in mobility investment says more about development finance institutions’ comfort with hard collateral than about venture investors’ newfound conviction in mobility business models.

3. The typical founder is raising less than half of what they raised a year ago

Median disclosed deal size fell from $4.65mn in H1 2025 to $2.65mn in H1 2026. Mean deal size, by contrast, held nearly flat at approximately $12mn in both periods — a figure kept artificially high in 2026 by the Spiro outlier. Any market summary that cites the mean without the median risks materially overstating what a typical founder is able to raise.

4. Two sectors now account for nearly half the market

Fintech (50 deals) and mobility (21 deals) together represented 47 per cent of all H1 2026 transactions. Agritech, by contrast, fell from twelve deals to eight. Capital is consolidating into the two categories with the clearest debt-financeable collateral — payment receivables and physical hard assets — rather than diversifying into health, climate or deep technology at the pace that has often been described in ecosystem commentary.

5. Geographic concentration has narrowed, not disappeared

Nigeria, Kenya, Egypt and South Africa — the continent’s four largest and most established venture markets — accounted for 53 per cent of all H1 2026 deals, down from 64 per cent in H1 2025. The shift is real: Nigeria overtook Egypt as the single most active market by deal count, and Francophone West and Central Africa produced a longer list of individually named transactions, including Côte d’Ivoire’s GoCab and a cluster of state-backed deals financed through the country’s FNER fund. But a fall from 64 per cent to 53 per cent still leaves more than half of all activity concentrated in the same four markets. A narrowing of concentration has been reported, in places, as a broadening of the ecosystem; the two are not the same claim.

6. The largest deals lost their sectoral range

The five largest disclosed transactions of H1 2025 spanned five different sectors: mobile money (Wave, $137.2mn), hearing healthcare (hearX Group, $100mn), solar energy (SolarAfrica, $98mn), clean cooking (Burn Manufacturing, $80mn) and proptech (Nawy, $75mn combined equity and debt). The five largest disclosed transactions of H1 2026 cluster almost entirely around mobility and energy infrastructure: Spiro’s equity and debt rounds, SolarAfrica’s $94mn debt facility, d.light’s $50mn green bond and GoCab’s $45mn financing. No health-technology, proptech or consumer fintech transaction appears anywhere near the top of the H1 2026 table. Whether this reflects a genuine narrowing of investor appetite by sector, or simply which deals happened to close in a six-month window, cannot be determined from a single half-year comparison — but the absence is notable on its own terms.

7. A single company took more than a quarter of all disclosed capital

Spiro, the pan-African battery-swapping and electric-motorcycle operator, raised $270mn in late-stage equity and secured a separate $50mn debt facility during the period — a combined $320mn against a total disclosed pool of $1.21bn. No comparable concentration existed in H1 2025, when the largest deal, Wave’s $137.2mn raise, represented under 10 per cent of total disclosed volume and the top five deals spanned five distinct sectors. Remove Spiro from the H1 2026 total and the remainder of the market raised less than 2025’s top three deals combined.

Methodology note: Figures are drawn from a Launch Base Africa tabulation of publicly (and privately sourced) reported H1 2025 and H1 2026 African start-up funding transactions.