Bloomberg just released the second edition of its Africa Startups to Watch list for 2026, and the names on it reveal something bigger than a ranking. Taken together, the 25 companies paint a clear picture of where the continent’s most urgent problems sit, and more importantly, who is bold enough to build solutions in the middle of them.
The list spans 25 privately held companies across 10 sectors and 11 countries. Healthcare, fintech, climate resilience, logistics, security, and agritech all feature prominently. But the central thread running through every entry is the same: these are companies building where governments, public institutions, and legacy systems have consistently fallen short.
Two numbers stand out before you even get to the names. First, nearly half of all funding raised by companies on this year’s list came from African investors, a signal that local capital is maturing fast. Second, fintech accounts for 36% of the list, but not the kind you might expect. These are not flashy consumer apps. They are payment rails, credit infrastructure, and financial plumbing that the continent’s economy runs on.
Here is the full breakdown, country by country.
Nigeria (4 Startups)
Nigeria tied with South Africa and Kenya as the most represented country, placing four companies on the list.
10mg Health – Healthcare
Founded: 2022 | Founder: Christian Nwachukwu
Hospitals and pharmacies across Nigeria routinely delay treatment because patients cannot afford upfront costs. 10mg Health steps into that gap by helping healthcare providers access working capital, using a combination of medical and behavioral data to assess credit risk. The founder is a pharmacist, which gives the company an operational edge that pure-tech founders rarely have in healthcare.
Remedial Health – Healthtech
Founded: 2021 | Founders: Samuel Okwuada, Victor Benjamin
Nigeria’s pharmaceutical supply chain is fragmented, opaque, and ripe for fraud. Remedial Health gives healthcare providers software to manage drug inventory, verify supplier authenticity, and access trade financing. The company has facilitated the financing of tens of millions of dollars worth of medicine across the continent, with Tencent among its backers.
Sycamore – Fintech
Founded: 2019 | Founder: Babatunde Akin-Moses
Sycamore offers fast digital lending and investment products to Nigerian individuals and businesses. What makes it worth watching in 2026 is its international expansion, particularly into the UK, positioning it to serve the Nigerian diaspora that currently has limited access to home-market financial products.
Terra Industries – Security / Defense Tech
Founded: 2024 | Founders: Nathan Nwachuku, Maxwell Maduka
The newest company on the entire list, Terra Industries is building mid-range drones and defense technologies specifically to counter the growing threat of drone-based attacks in the Sahel region. The company has already raised $34 million, backed by 8VC, which is connected to Palantir co-founder Joe Lonsdale. A second manufacturing facility is under construction in Ghana.
South Africa (4 Startups)
South Africa matched Nigeria’s count with four entries, spanning waste management, personal security, HR tech, and fintech.
Amesect – Waste Management
Founded: 2023 | Founders: Elsje Pieterse, Brendes Gresse, Dave Stewart
One of the youngest companies on the list, Amesect converts organic waste into fertilizer and animal feed using insects. The company is led by an entomologist, which is unusual for a startup but entirely appropriate for the problem it is solving. It targets rapidly growing African communities where waste collection has never kept pace with urban expansion.
Aura – Health and Security
Founded: 2017 | Founders: Warren Myers, Ryan Green
Public emergency services across many African cities are slow, underfunded, or unavailable. Aura fills that gap by connecting users to private emergency response and security providers through a mobile app. The company raised $14.5 million in a Series B round from the Cathay AfricInvest Innovation Fund.
Jem – HR Tech
Founded: 2020 | Founders: Simon Ellis, Caroline van der Merwe
Jem delivers HR tools through WhatsApp, giving employees access to payslips, employment documents, and financial services without needing a company portal or desktop access. The platform already serves around 200,000 workers across 200 companies, including McDonald’s franchise operators in South Africa. The WhatsApp-native approach makes it accessible to workers who would never use a traditional HR platform.
Omnisient – Fintech
Founded: 2019 | Founders: Jon Jacobson, Anton Grutzmacher
Credit scoring in Africa has always struggled with thin data. Omnisient solves this by pulling in alternative signals from retailers, telecoms, and everyday transaction histories, then using AI to help banks and insurers assess people who have no formal credit record. Backers include TransUnion, Arise, and Shoprite Holdings.
Kenya (4 Startups)
Kenya placed four companies on the list, covering transport, logistics, fintech, and HR.
BuuPass – Transport
Founded: 2016 | Founders: Sonia Kabra, Wyclife Omondi
Africa’s intercity travel market is large, fragmented, and almost entirely informal. BuuPass aggregates bus, train, and flight options into a single booking platform, bringing transparency and structure to a sector that has operated on trust and word-of-mouth for decades. The company is backed by Founders Factory Africa and the Google Black Founders Fund.
Leta – Logistics
Founded: 2021 | Founder: Nick Joshi
Last-mile delivery in Africa is expensive and unreliable. Leta gives businesses real-time tools to plan, assign, and monitor deliveries, reducing the operational friction that adds cost at every point in the chain. The Google Africa Investment Fund backs the company.
Oye – Fintech
Founded: 2022 | Founder: Kevin Mutiso
Boda boda (motorcycle taxi) drivers are one of the largest self-employed groups in East Africa and among the most financially excluded. Oye bundles accident insurance and credit access directly into everyday fuel purchases, meeting drivers where they already are. Britam Holdings is a backer, and the company is targeting one million enrolled drivers.
WorkPay – HR Tech
Founded: 2019 | Founders: Paul Kimani, Jackson Kungu
WorkPay started as a payroll platform and has grown into a full-stack HR, compliance, and financial services product operating across more than 30 African countries. It has raised over $10 million and counts Visa, Norrsken22, and Y Combinator among its investors. For a Kenyan startup, the 30-country footprint is a significant operational achievement.
Egypt (1 Startup)
Egypt placed only one company on Bloomberg’s list, a notable gap given that the country topped the Financial Times’ fastest-growing companies rankings in the same period.
WideBot – AI
Founded: 2016 | Founders: Mohamed Nabil, Mohamed Mostafa
Arabic is spoken by hundreds of millions of people, but most large language models perform poorly in Arabic and worse across regional dialects. WideBot builds Arabic-first conversational AI and customer experience tools that address this gap directly, targeting hundreds of millions of monthly interactions across the Middle East and North Africa.
Rest of Africa (12 Startups)
Beyond the big four, Bloomberg’s list draws from eight additional countries, which in itself is a statement about where innovation is actually happening.
Mauritius – AzamPay (Fintech)
Founded: 2018 | Founders: Firas Ahmad, Abubakar Bakhresa
AzamPay builds payment infrastructure for Tanzania and East Africa, with a mission to lower the cost of digital transactions in markets that still run heavily on cash. The founders drew inspiration from bKash’s success in Bangladesh, a model that proved low-income populations can leapfrog traditional banking when the infrastructure is right.
Tanzania – Black Swan (Fintech)
Founded: 2022 | Founders: Derick Kazimoto, Rwebu Mutahaba
Black Swan uses AI and non-traditional data points, including electricity bills and mobile transaction histories, to build credit profiles for individuals and small businesses that formal lenders cannot serve. Germany’s develoPPP Ventures backs the startup.
Tanzania – SafeSip (Healthtech)
Founded: 2023 | Founders: Faith Kuya, Constantine Edward
SafeSip deploys solar-powered, AI-monitored water purification systems that make contaminated water safe to drink while cutting dependence on bottled water and single-use plastics. It is one of the youngest companies on the list and addresses one of the continent’s most persistent public health failures.
Madagascar – Bôndy (Climate Resilience)
Founded: 2019 | Founders: Gabriel Tasso, Nelson Maillard, Max Fontaine
Bôndy restores forests and promotes regenerative agriculture to fight food insecurity driven by climate change and soil degradation. What makes it stand out on this list is what it has not done: the company has grown entirely without external equity funding, a rare distinction among the 25 companies featured.
Ghana – Complete Farmer (Agritech)
Founded: 2017 | Founder: Desmond Koney
Complete Farmer uses supply-chain data to connect smallholder farmers with verified buyers and input vendors, adding the traceability and quality assurance that export markets demand. The company has raised a Series A backed by Alitheia Capital.
Botswana – Deaftronics (Healthtech)
Founded: 2019 | Founders: Tendekayi Katsiga, Sarah Molema
Hearing aids are expensive and require reliable electricity for charging. Deaftronics solves both problems with solar-powered hearing devices built specifically for markets with inconsistent power access. Johnson & Johnson supports the company as it scales affordable hearing care across the continent.
Somalia – Ecosom (Climate Resilience)
Founded: 2019 | Founders: Musab Omar, Hisham Said, Muna Warsame
Ecosom converts agricultural waste and invasive mesquite trees into biochar, biofuel briquettes, and charcoal, simultaneously addressing soil degradation and energy access in drought-affected parts of Somalia. It is one of the hardest operating environments on the continent, which makes the company’s existence alone worth noting.
Ivory Coast – HUB2 (Fintech)
Founded: 2017 | Founders: Ashley Gauzere, Jean-Remi Kouchakji
HUB2 builds unified payment infrastructure that bridges mobile money, bank accounts, cards, and digital wallets across West and Central Africa. The company focuses on the CFA franc zone and is led by a former Orange executive with deep regional networks.
Cameroon – Nkwa (Fintech)
Founded: 2021 | Founders: Akwo Ashangndowah, Alice Ndeh, Claude Andui
Nkwa is a savings platform built for communities with low financial literacy and high informality. Backed by Cameroon’s Ministry of Finance and local angel investors, it is one of the few startups on this list with direct government alignment from the start.
Cameroon – Waspito (Healthtech)
Founded: 2020 | Founder: Jean Lobe
Waspito connects patients to available doctors instantly over the internet, no appointment required. Built during the COVID-19 pandemic after a personal family health crisis, the platform targets francophone Africa, a market that many digital health platforms have largely overlooked.
Pan-African – PawaPay (Fintech)
Founded: 2020 | Founder: Nikolai Barnwell
PawaPay helps businesses process mobile money payments across approximately 20 African markets from a single integration. The company raised around €6 million in seed funding and has been profitable since 2023, which makes it one of the few fintech startups on this continent that can make that claim.
Chad – Telemedan (Healthtech)
Founded: 2021 | Founder: Abakar Mahamat
Chad has one of the lowest doctor-to-patient ratios in the world. Telemedan uses solar-powered stations to connect patients with remote physicians, reducing the distance between a patient and a diagnosis in regions where walking to the nearest clinic can take an entire day. The company describes its model as “frugal innovation,” which is accurate.
What the List Actually Tells Us
A few patterns emerge when you look at all 25 names together.
Fintech is infrastructure, not apps. Nine of the 25 companies are in fintech, but none of them are consumer-facing in the traditional sense. They are building the pipes, the credit rails, and the payment bridges that other businesses depend on. That is a more mature and more durable form of fintech than the previous generation of digital wallets and lending apps.
Health is still deeply underserved. Seven companies address healthcare gaps in some form, spanning telemedicine, drug supply chains, medical financing, water safety, and hearing devices. The consistency of this theme across so many countries points to a structural failure that no single government has managed to fix at scale.
African investors are writing bigger checks. Nearly half of the combined funding on this list came from African capital. That is a shift. Earlier startup waves relied heavily on Western venture capital, which came with exit expectations and timelines that did not always suit African market realities.
Geography is spreading out. Beyond the usual Lagos-Nairobi-Cape Town corridor, Bloomberg found compelling companies in Tanzania, Madagascar, Somalia, Chad, Ivory Coast, and Cameroon. That geographic spread matters. It means the infrastructure and talent required to start and grow a company are no longer concentrated in just a handful of cities.
Startups on Both Bloomberg and FT Lists
Four companies earned spots on both Bloomberg’s Startups to Watch list and the Financial Times’ fastest-growing companies ranking in the same period: Sycamore and Remedial Health from Nigeria, and Omnisient and Aura from South Africa. Appearing on both lists with different selection criteria adds meaningful weight to those four names specifically.
The Bloomberg 2026 Africa Startups to Watch list is not a celebration. It is a diagnostic. Every company on it exists because something else failed, whether that was public healthcare, formal credit, waste collection, emergency services, or clean water access. The startups are the response to that failure, and they are building with speed, local knowledge, and increasingly, local money.
Whether all 25 make it to the next edition is uncertain. But the problems they are solving are not going anywhere, and that is precisely why they are worth watching.
Source: Bloomberg Africa Startups to Watch 2026 (Bloomberg Intelligence, second edition)
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