Bloomberg just published the second edition of its Africa Startups to Watch list, and the breakdown shows where African innovation is actually landing. Twenty-five companies across 14 countries made the cut. Kenya leads with four. Nigeria, South Africa, and Tanzania each placed multiple companies. Almost half the funding raised by companies on this year's list came from African investors, a share that signals a structural shift in how African startups are being funded.
Bloomberg editors and analysts scored each company on three things: how big the problem is, how original the solution is, and how much traction it has built with customers and investors. The selections cut across healthcare, fintech, logistics, climate technology, security, and AI.
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Nigeria's Four: Defence, Healthcare, Pharma, and Lending
Nigeria placed four companies on the list: Terra Industries, 10mg Health, Remedial Health, and Sycamore. The sectors span defence, healthcare finance, pharmaceutical supply chain, and digital lending.
Terra Industries is the most unusual entry. Founded in 2024 by Nathan Nwachuku and Maxwell Maduka, the company builds unmanned aerial systems and defence technologies targeting security threats across the Sahel. It has raised a reported $34 million across two rounds, backed by 8VC and Palantir co-founder Joe Lonsdale. A second manufacturing facility is already underway in Ghana. A Nigerian defence tech startup attracting that profile of capital and attention is a different signal entirely.
10mg Health, founded by pharmacist Christian Nwachukwu in 2022, sits at the intersection of healthcare and fintech. It helps hospitals and pharmacies access financing in markets where upfront costs routinely delay treatment. Remedial Health, backed by Tencent and Y Combinator, tackles pharmaceutical supply chain gaps - inventory management, supplier verification, and financing for healthcare providers. Sycamore, the digital lender founded in 2019, secured an MFB licence this year through an acquisition and is now expanding into the UK.
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Kenya Dominates, But the Full Map Is More Interesting
Kenya's four entries, BuuPass, Leta, Oye, and WorkPay, are each solving infrastructure problems that government and traditional institutions have repeatedly failed to fix.
BuuPass puts bus, train, and flight bookings on a single platform, building data infrastructure for a travel sector that has historically operated on paper and cash. Google's Black Founders Fund is among its backers. Leta helps businesses track and optimise deliveries in real time. It closed a $5 million seed round in July 2025 and entered Ghana shortly after. Oye links insurance and credit to fuel purchases for boda-boda motorcycle taxi riders, targeting one million drivers with Britam as a backer. WorkPay started as payroll software and now runs HR, compliance, and financial services tools across more than 30 African countries, backed by Visa, Norrsken22, and Y Combinator.
The companies outside the big three markets deserve equal attention. Deaftronics builds solar-powered hearing aids for markets where disposable batteries are expensive and electricity is unreliable. Johnson & Johnson is among its backers. Telemedan in Chad runs solar-powered telemedicine stations in some of the world's most underserved healthcare environments. SafeSip in Tanzania uses AI-monitored solar purification to tackle contaminated water without single-use plastics. Ecosom turns invasive mesquite and agricultural waste into biochar, briquettes, and cleaner fuel alternatives, targeting soil health and food security in drought-prone Somalia.
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What the List Actually Says About African Tech in 2026
The theme Bloomberg chose is urgency, and it holds. Most companies on this list exist because a government, a bank, or a piece of public infrastructure failed to show up. That describes the opportunity those founders are converting.
The local capital figure is worth examining on its own. When almost half the funding on a Bloomberg-curated list comes from African investors, the narrative that African startups depend entirely on foreign capital starts to crack. PawaPay reported profitability in 2023. Bôndy has reached its current scale without taking external equity, an unusual path for any startup on a Bloomberg list.
For Nigerian founders and investors, the list is worth reading critically. Defence tech, pharmaceutical logistics, healthcare finance, and digital lending are all represented. The gap is climate and sustainability, a category East Africa and Southern Africa own almost entirely on this list. No Nigerian climate or sustainability startup made the cut. That is increasingly hard to explain given the country's exposure to flooding, drought, and energy insecurity.
Bloomberg will publish this list again. The founders building now are the ones who will define what the next edition looks like.
