Africa’s 18 Unicorn Candidates: M-Kopa, Spiro, and the 2026 IPO Pipeline

A Continent Without a New Unicorn for a Full Year

The numbers tell a stark story. According to analysis by Tekedia of Africa’s unicorn landscape, Africa closed 2025 without a single new tech unicorn — the first such year since the continent began minting billion-dollar startups. The nine existing unicorns, eight of which are fintech companies, collectively raised just $100 million in equity during the year, the lowest figure since 2020 and a dramatic fall from the $3.4 billion peak of 2021-2022.

Public market activity was equally subdued. IPO discussions that had been circulating since late 2023 largely stalled. Only two non-unicorn listings materialized: Optasia on the Johannesburg Stock Exchange and Cash Plus in Morocco — both meaningful firsts for their respective markets, but neither representing the blockbuster Africa IPO moment that investors had been anticipating. Together they barely moved the needle for a continent whose startup ecosystem had been valued, at its peak, at tens of billions of dollars in paper returns.

The slowdown had structural causes. Global risk appetite shifted toward AI infrastructure investment in the US and Europe, compressing the pool of late-stage capital available to emerging-market growth companies. Valuations set during the 2021-2022 froth remained on the books of companies that couldn’t raise new rounds without accepting significant mark-downs. The result: a frozen late-stage market where strong operators built real businesses but couldn’t access the capital needed to force liquidity events.

In 2026, conditions are beginning — tentatively — to improve. Q1 2026 data from TechCabal shows African startups raised $711 million across more than 80 deals in the first quarter, with fintech ($221M), logistics and transport ($149M), and energy and water ($141M) leading by sector. That pace, if sustained, would put the continent on track for roughly $2.8 billion annually — still below the 2021-2022 highs but well above the 2023-2024 lows. The 18-company watchlist represents where that recovering capital is most likely to flow.

The Watchlist: 18 Candidates Across Four Sectors

BusinessDay’s full watchlist spans 18 companies organized across fintech, mobility, energy, and emerging verticals. Not all of them will reach $1 billion valuations in 2026 — some may pursue IPOs at sub-unicorn valuations, others may raise large private rounds that reset the clock. What links them is that each has demonstrated the combination of revenue scale, investor backing, and market position that makes a late-stage liquidity event plausible within 12-24 months.

Fintech (8 companies): M-Kopa, Stitch, LemFi, valU, PalmPay, Kuda, Yoco, and Onafriq. Fintech remains the deepest part of the pipeline because it is the sector with the most mature exit infrastructure — Flutterwave and Interswitch demonstrated the playbook, and newer platforms have built on it.

Mobility (4 companies): Moove, Spiro, Yassir, and Gozem. The mobility cluster is the most internationally interesting because it spans asset-light ride-hailing (Yassir), vehicle financing (Moove), and electric two-wheelers (Spiro, Gozem) — three distinct business models racing toward scale simultaneously.

Energy (4 companies): Sun King, d.light, SolarSaver, and PowerGen. Off-grid solar and distributed energy remain underleveraged as a public-market story, given that these companies serve tens of millions of customers with creditworthy payment histories that rival the best fintech books.

Other (2 companies): Nawy (real estate, Egypt) and LXE Hearing (healthtech), which raised $100 million via merger in 2025 and stands as the best-capitalized startup outside fintech on the list.

Three Companies to Watch Most Closely

1. M-Kopa: Revenue, Profit, and a Series F That Changes the Valuation Conversation

M-Kopa is the single most compelling unicorn candidate on the list, and the financial results explain why. TechCabal’s October 2025 analysis of M-Kopa’s financials confirmed that the Kenya-based digital finance platform generated $416 million in revenue in 2024 — a 66% year-over-year increase — and reported its first-ever profit of $9.2 million (KES 1.2 billion). The operating income figure was even more striking: a fivefold increase to $51 million, driven by interest income from M-Kopa’s customer loan book of $164.5 million.

Founded in 2011 to sell solar home systems on credit to low-income households, M-Kopa has evolved into a full-spectrum consumer credit platform offering smartphones, cash loans, and insurance across Kenya, Uganda, Nigeria, Ghana, and South Africa. It has disbursed over $2 billion in credit to more than 7 million customers. Sumitomo joined the Series F round alongside long-standing backers Generation Investment Management, Lightrock, and British International Investment. Total funding raised exceeds $250 million.

The profitability signal matters as much as the revenue number. African startups have historically struggled to demonstrate that their unit economics can survive the transition from growth-stage to mature-stage operations. M-Kopa’s positive EBITDA at $416M revenue — combined with 7 million active credit customers — creates a financial profile that is credible for either a private unicorn valuation or a public market listing.

2. Spiro: $350M Valuation and the E-Mobility Category Bet

Spiro’s $100 million raise in October 2025 was the largest single e-mobility investment in Africa’s history. TechCrunch’s coverage of the round reported that the Fund for Export Development in Africa (FEDA), the development arm of Afreximbank, led the round with $75 million, with the balance from strategic investors. The round pushed Spiro’s valuation to $350 million — still below the unicorn threshold, but with $280 million in total capital raised since its 2022 founding by Gagan Gupta, the trajectory is clear.

Operationally, Spiro controls more than half of Kenya’s electric bike market, with 60,000+ e-bikes deployed across six countries: Benin, Togo, Kenya, Rwanda, Uganda, and Nigeria. Its battery-swapping infrastructure — 1,500 stations — is the operational moat that distinguishes it from pure hardware plays. Reaching 100,000 deployed bikes was the stated target for end-2025; hitting that number across six markets would create the scale argument for a unicorn valuation in a follow-on round.

The e-mobility category is structurally attractive for Africa’s late-stage capital market because it combines hardware (e-bikes) with a recurring revenue model (battery subscriptions and swap fees) and a credit layer (motorcycle financing). That combination mirrors the M-Kopa model one vertical over, and investors who backed M-Kopa through to profitability recognize the pattern.

3. Yassir: Algeria’s Candidate and the Acquisition That Changed the Story

Yassir is the most consequential company on the list for the Algerian tech ecosystem, and its trajectory in 2026 has been shaped by corporate moves as much as fundraising. The Algeria-founded super-app had previously raised $30 million in a 2021 Series A and $150 million in a November 2022 Series B — a total of $193 million across four rounds from 42 investors. An undisclosed internal Series C reportedly worth $104.95 million has circulated in investor databases, and some market observers believe Yassir has already crossed the unicorn threshold without formally announcing the valuation.

In March 2026, Yassir acquired the Uno hypermarket chain from Algerian industrial conglomerate Cevital, a move that significantly expanded its physical commerce and last-mile delivery infrastructure following Jumia’s exit from Algeria. The acquisition gave Yassir both brand-name retail locations and the logistics backbone to scale its e-grocery operation, repositioning the company from a ride-hailing app to a genuine commerce platform.

Some investors expect Yassir to pursue either a large confirmed Series C round or preliminary IPO discussions in 2026. Its North Africa positioning — serving Algeria, Morocco, Tunisia, and francophone West Africa — gives it geographic diversification that pure-Nigerian or pure-Kenyan platforms cannot claim. Whether that translates to a formal unicorn announcement or a public market move will depend on whether the founding team decides to crystallize the narrative now or wait for a larger exit window.

What the Pipeline Reveals About Africa’s Capital Market in 2026

The 18-company watchlist is significant not just for the individual companies on it, but for what it reveals about the structural state of Africa’s startup capital market. Eighteen credible late-stage candidates in a single year is the broadest such pipeline the continent has assembled since the 2021-2022 boom — but the contrast with that era is instructive.

In 2021-2022, startups became unicorns via valuation rounds funded by global growth-stage capital that flowed into Africa as part of a general risk-on environment. In 2026, the candidates on this list are reaching unicorn territory via a different mechanism: demonstrated revenue at scale, first profits, and operational infrastructure that institutional investors can underwrite with confidence. M-Kopa’s $416M revenue and positive EBITDA is a fundamentally different unicorn thesis than a valuation awarded on growth metrics alone.

That shift has implications for how these exits will be structured. IPOs — whether on African exchanges like the Johannesburg Stock Exchange, the Nigerian Stock Exchange, or the Algiers Growth Segment, or on international markets — require audited financials, consistent unit economics, and governance standards that valuation rounds do not. The two 2025 listings (Optasia and Cash Plus) established proof points. If even two or three of the 18 watchlist companies pursue public exits in 2026, it would mark the most active African tech IPO year since the market was formed. The conditions — improving sentiment, recovering capital flows, and a cohort of genuinely profitable operators — are more aligned than they have been in four years.

Frequently Asked Questions

Sources & Further Reading

• Africa’s Next Unicorns: 18 Startups in Hunt for $1bn Valuations or IPOs in 2026 — BusinessDay/Extensia
• M-KOPA Turns First-Ever Profit as Revenue Hits $416M — TechCabal
• Spiro Raises $100M, the Largest-Ever Investment in Africa’s E-Mobility — TechCrunch
• Algerian Super-App Yassir Buys Uno Hypermarkets — Launch Base Africa
• Over $700M Raised in Q1 2026 — TechCabal Insights
• From Boom to Pause: How Africa’s Unicorn Momentum Stalled in 2025 — Tekedia