African Fintech: The Players

How many fintechs does Africa actually have?

Not the handful of unicorns that show up in funding announcements, but the funded and unfunded, the alive and the dead, sorted by what they build, where they build it, and whether anyone gave them money.

I compiled a dataset of 5,000 African fintechs by cross-referencing funding databases, deal trackers, and company registries, then filtering out anything with no funding history and no meaningful activity.

Of those 5,000 companies, 239 have raised venture capital or institutional funding. That's 4.8%. And 992 are dead.

The 4.8%

For every funded African fintech, there are 20 unfunded ones. The other 95% operate without any institutional capital.

The top five companies by equity funding, Flutterwave ($489M), OPay ($570M), Moniepoint ($266M), MNT Halan ($260M in equity, $668M including debt and securitizations), and Wave ($200M), hold more than $1.7 billion between them. The remaining 234 funded companies share the rest.

Five unicorns have emerged. Flutterwave at $3.2 billion after a June 2026 Series E led by Ripple. OPay at $2 billion from its 2021 Series C, now targeting a $4 billion NYSE IPO with an F-1 filed in October 2026. Wave at $1.7 billion, though that valuation dates to 2021 with no new equity since. MNT Halan at roughly $1.4 billion, with its Egyptian Exchange listing starting October 20. Moniepoint at $1 billion.

OPay's F-1 reported 2025 revenue of $536 million, up 161% year over year, and H1 2026 net income of $90.9 million. If the IPO prices at $4 billion, it would be the largest African fintech public offering.

Where the companies are

Nigeria accounts for 1,757 of the 5,000 companies. More than a third. But it also has the highest mortality: 25% of Nigerian fintechs in the dataset are dead. The market produces the most and kills the most.

Egypt looks different. Only 218 companies, but 13% mortality, the lowest of any major market. Egypt's capital is more concentrated. MNT Halan alone raised more total capital ($668M including debt) than the entire funded fintech base of most African countries. Fawry, the public payments company, posted a 31% net margin in H1 2026.

South Africa sits second in company count (937) but third in total funding. The market's survival rate is decent at 15%, but it hasn't produced a megadeal at the Nigeria or Egypt scale. Yoco ($107M, payments) and Lula ($42M, lending) are the biggest raises. The standout is how many South African fintechs stay alive without raising much.

Kenya produced 485 companies. Its funded players skew toward lending (7 funded) over payments (4 funded), a different shape than Nigeria's payment-heavy concentration. Cellulant ($48M in equity) and NALA ($50M in credit financing) lead.

What they build

Payments is the most populated segment at 1,365 companies. It's also where the most capital concentrates: 56 funded companies, including four of the five unicorns. But 266 payments companies are dead, a 19% mortality rate.

Digital lending has fewer companies (564) but a higher ratio of funded ones (52 of 564). Lending generates revenue immediately, but where a payments company needs network effects and scale, a lending company needs capital and a credit model. That capital requirement filters out underfunded entrants, but the ones who clear it tend to survive. Mortality is 17%.

Banking tech has the lowest mortality at 13%. Once you get a banking license, you tend to stay alive. The regulatory moat filters in both directions. You need capital and connections to get licensed, and once you're in, the license itself is a barrier competitors have to clear.

Crowdfunding has the highest mortality at 39%. The segment largely didn't work in Africa. Regulatory uncertainty was part of it, but informal savings circles, tontines in West Africa, chamas in East Africa, and stokvels in Southern Africa, already serve the pooled-savings use case. They've done it for generations without apps.

Investment tech has 1,230 companies but only 37 funded and a 24% mortality rate. Too many retail trading apps chasing the same users.

The profitable ones

OPay reported $72.5 million in net profit in 2025, and Fawry posted a 31% net margin in H1 2026 on EGP 5.2 billion in revenue. MNT Halan reported nearly EGP 2 billion in net income in 2025 and is listing on the Egyptian Exchange. Interswitch recovered from a ₦1.6 billion loss in FY2024 to ₦23 billion in pre-tax profit in FY2025.

PalmPay reportedly reached profitability in 2025 and is preparing a Hong Kong IPO at a valuation above $1 billion. Moniepoint claims profitability since 2023 but hasn't published audited figures.

Flutterwave isn't there yet. Its CEO targeted profitability in 2025, then revised the timeline to 2026. Revenue was estimated at $95 million in 2024. Kuda lost about $6 million in 2024, an 84% improvement from $35 million the year before, and cut staff in early 2026. Chipper Cash, which raised over $250 million and hit a $2.2 billion valuation in 2021, barely reached quarterly free cash flow breakeven in Q4 2025.

Every profitable company runs on either high transaction volume or direct lending revenue. OPay and Fawry process enough daily payments to generate margin at scale. MNT Halan earns interest on loans. Digital banks and cross-border platforms are still spending to grow.

Two of three are Chinese-controlled

Two of Nigeria's three largest payment apps are backed by Chinese capital.

OPay was incubated by Opera, the Norwegian-founded browser company that's been controlled by Chinese investors through Kunlun Tech since 2016. OPay's $120 million Series B in 2019 came almost entirely from Chinese VCs. By 2021, SoftBank led the Series C at a $2 billion valuation.

PalmPay is backed by Transsion Holdings, the Chinese phone manufacturer behind the Tecno, Infinix, and Itel brands. Transsion ships more phones in Africa than Samsung. It led PalmPay's $40 million seed round and remains the majority owner. PalmPay comes pre-installed on Transsion devices.

Transsion owns the hardware layer, and PalmPay sits on top of it as the payment layer. It's the same model Alipay ran on top of Alibaba's commerce platform, adapted for a continent where smartphone distribution is the scarcest resource.

No regulator has publicly pushed back against the ownership structure, but Nigerian bank technology failures in recent years pushed users toward OPay and PalmPay as alternatives. The two most reliable payment apps in Nigeria's largest market are Chinese-controlled.

The telcos are bigger

The VC-funded fintechs get the headlines, but the telcos move the money.

M-Pesa processed $320 billion in Kenya in its fiscal year ending March 2026 across 46.4 billion transactions and 41 million monthly active customers. M-Pesa revenue alone was $1.4 billion, now nearly half of Safaricom's total service revenue. Safaricom is doubling peak processing capacity from 4,000 to 8,000 transactions per second by end of 2026.

MTN MoMo has over 70 million monthly active users across 17 African markets. In the first half of 2026, it processed roughly 13 billion transactions worth over $330 billion. Annualized, that's $661 billion. MTN's CEO says the company is shifting from building scale to monetizing advanced services like lending, and is studying bank licenses in some markets.

Airtel Money reached over 56 million users with annualized transaction value exceeding $245 billion. Under 30% of Airtel Africa's 184 million mobile subscribers use the money product. Airtel Money is preparing a London IPO.

For comparison, OPay, the most-funded VC-backed African fintech at $570 million in equity, doesn't publicly report transaction volumes at a scale that compares. The telcos remain the financial infrastructure in most African markets. Fintechs build on top of mobile money rails or compete in niches the telcos underserve. The only market where fintechs lead outright is Nigeria.

The Nigeria exception

Nigeria is the only major African market where fintechs lead over telcos in mobile payments.

The Central Bank of Nigeria delayed granting telcos mobile money licenses for years. Safaricom launched M-Pesa in Kenya in 2007. MTN didn't receive its Nigerian Payment Service Bank license until 2022. That 15-year gap created a vacuum.

OPay, PalmPay, and Moniepoint filled it. By the time MTN's MoMo agent network launched in Nigeria, the fintechs had already built distribution. OPay has over 5,000 employees and processes enough volume to generate $536 million in annual revenue. Moniepoint has over 5,000 employees and handles 800 million transactions per month.

This regulatory history explains why Nigeria's fintech market is so much larger than any other African market. Not because Nigeria has more entrepreneurs, but because it had a structural gap that didn't exist in Kenya, where M-Pesa was already dominant, or in Francophone West Africa, where Orange Money had the market.

Two ecosystems on one continent

The Francophone and Anglophone fintech markets operate on different rhythms.

In Anglophone markets, each country has its own regulator, the CBN in Nigeria and the CBK in Kenya among them, and licensing frameworks move independently. If Nigeria's regulatory environment tightens, a Kenyan fintech is unaffected.

In Francophone West Africa, the BCEAO, the central bank for eight WAEMU countries sharing the CFA franc, imposed a unified licensing regime in January 2024. The deadline triggered service freezes for unlicensed fintechs. Only about 20 fintechs had been licensed by September 2025. An instant payment deadline for banks was extended to September 2026, then again to mid-2027.

WAEMU fintech funding in 2026 produced only 12 publicly disclosed deals.

Wave, which dominates Francophone mobile money with 23 million monthly active users across Senegal, Ivory Coast, Mali, Burkina Faso, and Uganda, grew despite this environment by operating as a licensed electronic money institution. Its flat 1% transaction fee undercut Orange Money's pricing. Wave's market share in West African transaction volume climbed from 19% to 23%, while Orange dropped from 42% to around 38%.

Djamo, the standout Francophone fintech beyond Wave, raised $17 million in April 2025, Ivory Coast's largest venture round. Over one million customers, $4.5 billion in transactions processed, revenue up 5x since 2022.

Orange Money remains the incumbent with 9 billion transactions in 2024 and €164 billion in value, but Wave's flat 1% fee is compressing its margins. The Francophone market is a two-player fight between a telco and a startup, with the regulator inadvertently clearing the field of smaller competitors.

The deadpool

992 companies, one in five. The mortality data tells you where the market is oversupplied and which models don't translate.

Crowdfunding died the fastest (39%). Crypto and investment tech followed (24-25%). Payments lost companies at 19% but the volume is so high that 266 dead payments fintechs still represents the largest absolute graveyard.

Banking tech had the lowest mortality (13%) because licensing filters in both directions: you need capital, regulatory relationships, and operational maturity to get in, and once you have it, the license protects you.

Nigeria kills the most companies (439 dead, 25% mortality). Egypt kills the fewest relative to its base (28 dead, 13%). Egypt's fintech market is smaller and more capital-efficient, with higher average funding and better survival rates.

Kippa raised $12 million for SMB bookkeeping in Nigeria and still deadpooled. Chipper Cash raised $250 million, hit a $2 billion valuation, and spent two years trying to reach breakeven. Capital doesn't guarantee survival, it buys time, and some companies used that time better than others.

The map underneath

The player-level data reveals a market that's more concentrated and more dependent on a few structural advantages than the headline numbers suggest.

Each major ecosystem owes its shape to a specific regulatory or distribution accident. Nigeria's fintechs filled the gap the central bank created by keeping telcos out. Egypt's winners found lending and bill-pay models that generate revenue from day one. Wave undercut Orange Money's pricing in a region where the regulator froze everyone else out. OPay and PalmPay rode Chinese hardware distribution that no local competitor could match.

Five companies crossed a billion dollars in valuation while 992 went to zero, and the distance between those outcomes is shorter than the funding headlines make it look.