Investing in African tech has always exacted a price. The burn is slow, unforgiving, and increasingly public. Each failure leaves a mark, and the list of casualties grows longer by the month. Peer into the books of the continent’s most prolific investors and a grim pattern emerges: those who have been burned — repeatedly — are abandoning old certainties, dismantling familiar playbooks, and stepping beyond home turf into markets that feel less like opportunity and more like exile.

The numbers tell a sobering story. Over $200 million in investments were lost from just 15 African tech startups in 2023 alone. Dash, the Ghanaian fintech that raised a record $32.8 million seed round and claimed to have processed over $1 billion in transactions, collapsed in late 2023 following revelations of fabricated user metrics — inflated by around 400% — and a $25 million cash shortfall. Sendy, the Kenyan logistics darling, appears in the failure columns of, at least, three separate funds. Copia, at least, in two.

These were not isolated miscalculations. They were sector-wide bets, made simultaneously by sophisticated investors reading the same flawed signals. For the funds that backed them, the past three years have been an expensive education — and the way each has responded tells you more about the state of African venture capital than any deal announcement.

$200M+ Lost across 15 African tech startups in 2023 alone

DOB Equity: from breadth to depth

DOB Equity, the family-backed impact investor with operations in Kenya and the Netherlands, learned its lesson through the school of hard knocks. Under previous co-CEOs Saskia van der Mast and Hayo Afman, the fund built a diverse portfolio of more than 30 companies across East Africa — and watched it buckle. Logistics startup Sendy and B2C e-commerce platform Copia both hit severe financial difficulties. Sendy’s failure, in particular, became a case study in the risks of emerging market logistics plays.

The response was a complete strategic overhaul. In 2024, the fund appointed Karen Serem Waithaka — formerly Chief Investment Officer at Catalyst Fund — as CEO, and tasked her with narrowing the fund’s mandate to three pillars: sustainable food systems, renewable energy, and water and sanitation. Sectors where infrastructure gaps create structural demand rather than speculative growth stories.

The first investments under the revised thesis made the shift tangible. In 2025, DOB Equity backed Spouts International, a Ugandan company manufacturing ceramic water filters under the Purifaaya brand, made from locally sourced materials. Shortly after, the fund invested in FarmWorks, a Kenyan agribusiness connecting smallholder farmers to reliable off-take buyers across 23 branches and more than 4,500 monthly customers.

“Our impact thesis continues to be the core driver of our investment strategy,” Waithaka said. “We invest in companies that provide solutions enabling communities to become more sustainable and resilient, while simultaneously ensuring the lasting viability of these businesses.”

The emphasis on “lasting viability” marks a clear departure from the growth-at-all-costs thinking that defined the previous cycle. It is also, notably, a strategy where progress is harder to fake — you can count water filters, inspect farm distribution branches, and verify carbon credits. After Dash, that matters.

EchoVC Partners: smaller cheques, harder lessons

For EchoVC Partners, the Lagos-based firm founded in 2011, the failure rate has been particularly brutal. The firm’s losses include Yana, Ma3Route, Africa Courier Express, and Gro Intelligence — a list that covers financial software, transport, logistics, and data analytics, suggesting the problems were not sector-specific but something deeper: a deployment model built for a market that did not yet exist at the scale being assumed.

Managing partner Eghosa Omoigui has responded with a philosophy that runs against the grain of most institutional venture thinking. Rather than raising larger funds to chase bigger deals, EchoVC doubled down on microfunds. In September 2025, the firm published results from its $2.5 million climate-tech pilot, backed by Shell Foundation and UKAid, which deployed small cheques across 15 startups in energy storage, clean cooking, renewables, waste management, and mobility.

“We just think that they’re better for the ecosystem,” Omoigui said of microfunds. “When you raise a large fund, you want to write a $10 million cheque. But eventually — where the market really needs help, which is under a million dollars — it just doesn’t make sense to write that size of cheque.”

The argument extends to exit expectations. With smaller cheques and lower entry valuations, a fund can generate respectable returns from modest outcomes rather than betting everything on unicorn exits that rarely materialise in markets this young. EchoVC’s recent deal flow — Rana Energy, E-Safiri, Earthbond, Baridi, ChargeAM, PowerUP Uganda — skews toward energy infrastructure: businesses with physical assets, paying customers, and revenue lines that auditors can verify.

4DX Ventures

Few failures concentrated minds as sharply as Dash. The Ghanaian payments startup built its pitch around cross-border mobile money interoperability — the gap between Africa’s 200+ mobile money wallets and 100+ banks that don’t talk to each other. It was a real problem, compellingly told. Founder Prince Boakye Boampong raised $32.8 million at seed stage, a continental record. 4DX Ventures was among the backers.

When audits finally arrived, in late 2023, they found that approximately 95% of user data was fabricated. A $25 million cash shortfall had gone unreported. Boampong was suspended and then terminated. The Bank of Ghana shut the company down for operating without the necessary licences. In total, Dash had consumed over $86 million in investor capital.

For 4DX, the aftermath has involved a visible tightening of geographic and sector focus. Its recent investments are concentrated in Egypt — Taager, Suplyd, and Palm Cairo among them — and in companies that are already generating revenue. In late 2025, the firm closed approximately $50 million toward its third fund, with a $10.5 million anchor from the International Finance Corporation. That IFC commitment is significant: it signals that institutional capital still trusts the team, but the governance infrastructure now being built around Fund III — senior advisors Mimi Alemayehou and Kurankye Sekyi-Otu, tighter LP accountability, a narrower thesis — suggests 4DX is aware that trust needs rebuilding.

The shift toward Egypt is not accidental. The country offers a relatively stable currency, and distance from the funding competition that crowded valuations during the boom years. Several other burned funds have drawn the same conclusion.

Goodwell Investments: the weight of the write-downs

Goodwell Investments, the Amsterdam-based impact fund founded in 2005, presents one of the starkest illustrations of portfolio damage. Its losses span multiple geographies and business models: Nigerian fintech Lydia, Kenyan e-commerce platform Copia, Kenyan logistics startup Sendy, South African mobility data company WhereIsMyTransport, and Zande, a South African trade finance platform targeting SMEs. The common thread is not a single bad sector call — it is exposure across the full spectrum of African tech’s most popular categories simultaneously.

The recalibration is visible in deal flow. Recent Goodwell investments include Hinckley Recycling, an environmental services business; Inclusivity Solutions, an insurance platform; and Omniretail, a B2B commerce company already generating profit. The shift from B2C consumer plays toward B2B infrastructure is consistent with a fund that has learned, at some cost, that the consumer acquisition economics of emerging markets are harder to make work than pitch decks suggest.

Mobility 54: the corporate VC reality check

Toyota Tsusho’s corporate venture arm, Mobility 54, launched in 2019 with a mandate to drive innovation in African mobility. By its fifth year, the results were mixed. BasiGo, the Kenyan electric bus company, showed genuine promise. But the failure list — Sendy, Drive to Own, AiCare, SparePap, Teliman — covered Kenya, South Africa, and Mali, and spanned logistics, automotive, healthcare, and spares marketplaces. The breadth of the failures made any single sector thesis hard to sustain.

In March 2025, Mobility 54 announced that Teppei Maki would succeed founding CEO Takeshi Watanabe from April. The leadership change arrived without a formal strategic announcement. But the subsequent investment tells its own story: Ruby Bio, a US-based company developing biosynthesis products from low-cost sugar. Not a mobility startup. Not in Africa. The geographic and sector departure is the clearest signal the fund has sent about the limits of its original mandate.

Ingressive Capital looks beyond Nigeria

Ingressive Capital’s Nigeria story is the most layered of the group. The Lagos-based seed fund had genuine early-stage wins — Paystack, acquired by Stripe, remains the marquee name — alongside a track record in SeamlessHR, Mono and Bamboo. The fund’s identity was built on Nigeria, which made the subsequent losses feel particularly pointed: 54gene, the genomics startup that raised $45 million and wound down in 2023; Cova; TalentMatch; OGA Hotels; Mecho; and Gwala, a Moroccan earned-wage access platform.

The response has been geographic expansion, executed quietly but consistently. Ingressive’s recent deal flow runs to Fabconnect and Nowlun and Sehatech in Egypt; REasy in Cameroon; NylaBank in Ghana; and MasteryHive — a UK-based fintech founded by Nigerian diaspora entrepreneurs. That last investment is telling: the fund has not abandoned Nigerian talent, but it has stopped requiring that talent to build in Nigeria.

Adaverse: when the market moves, so do you

Adaverse occupies a category of its own. The Singapore-based accelerator launched in 2021 to back African Web3 infrastructure, deploying up to $200,000 per startup at its peak. Its portfolio included Momint in South Africa, Cassava Network in Nigeria, Afriguild, Continental Stablecoin, and others. The majority are no longer operating.

The firm’s response was not to refine the African Web3 thesis but to abandon the geography. By 2024, Adaverse had redirected its attention to the Middle East, backing UmrahCash — a Saudi-based, Nigeria-born startup offering blockchain-powered financial services for the Muslim pilgrimage economy — with $500,000. It is a more honest version of what other funds have done incrementally: when a market repeatedly disappoints, at some point the rational response is to leave.

What the failures taught

The common thread running through these recalibrations is a rejection of the assumptions that fuelled the 2021–2022 boom. Investors who once chased user growth and transaction volumes now prioritise unit economics and verifiable revenue. Those who wrote large cheques for pan-African expansion prefer smaller, more focused bets. Funds concentrated on Nigeria and Kenya are diversifying into Egypt, Francophone Africa, and beyond.

The market data validates the shift. AVCA figures show that late-stage investment has thinned to a trickle, with only two late-stage equity deals recorded across Africa in the third quarter of 2025. Mega-deals — the $50 million-plus rounds that defined the boom — now account for just 18% of total deal value, against a long-term average of 39%. Venture debt, meanwhile, has reached $1.6 billion in 2025, more than double the full-year total for 2024, as founders and investors both seek capital structures that don’t require unicorn exits to work.

Sector preferences have shifted accordingly. Financials, which dominated African venture capital at 59% of total value in 2024, fell to 31% in 2025. Industrials, information technology, and essential-economy sectors — consumer staples, energy, utilities — have grown their collective share to nearly a fifth of total funding. The infrastructure bet, long dismissed as unglamorous, is having its moment.

AT A GLANCE: SEVERAL INVESTORS, ONE RESET

The new strategy documents now seem carefully worded. ‘Patient capital.’ ‘Hands-on approach.’ ‘Lasting viability.’ The language is more cautious than 2021’s vintage. But the harder test is whether the caution is structural or cosmetic — whether it shows up in board-level governance and portfolio monitoring, or only in the pitch decks sent to new LPs.

The CEO pivot is worth watching closely. Three of the seven funds, at least, disclosed new leaders in direct proximity to their strategic recalibrations — DOB Equity, Mobility 54, and 4DX Ventures (via senior advisors). New leadership provides institutional permission to continuously recalibrate.

For founders, the message is unambiguous: build businesses that can survive without constant infusions of foreign capital. “Many fintech startups build what looks good on pitch decks but fail to solve real, urgent, and scalable local problems,” said Gabriel Okonkwo, a Nigerian tech commentator. “The value proposition might excite foreign investors, but it often misses the mark with the average Nigerian user.”

The new generation of successful startups, investors now recognize, won’t be the ones that raise the most money. They’ll be the ones that build lasting value, navigate local complexity, and adapt faster than they hype. Whether the funds backing them have learned the same lesson is something only the next portfolio cycle will confirm.

Reporting drawn from public investment records, company announcements, fund disclosures, and publicly-disclosed market data. All investment figures sourced from disclosed fundraising data.