Stories of Tech Unicorns in Africa

Welcome to Lucidity Insights' second episode in this three-part podcast series, where we take a look at the Future of Fintech in Africa. But in order to look forward, we need to look at which African startups have already been successful. Unsurprisingly, the vast majority of unicorns in Africa are fintechs. We cover the unicorn stories of Interswitch from Nigeria, Flutterwave from Nigeria/USA, Opay from Nigeria, Wave Mobile from Senegal, Andela from Nigeria/USA, Chipper from Ghana/USA, and MNT-Halan from Egypt. We also cover some very honourable mentions: Paystack from Nigeria, which got bought out by Stripe before reaching unicorn status; Fawry in Egypt who successfully IPO'd in 2019 and achieved a >$1 billion status in 2020; and Jumia, who is considered Africa's first unicorn, who also successfully IPOed in 2019.