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Sheriff here.

In 2019, a study in Kenya found that 96% of companies that raised over $1 million were started by white founders.

It’s a stark number that spells nothing but inequality. That was seven years ago.

It’s 2026 now, and while the numbers are much better, the story hasn’t changed much.

This week, we’ll unpack that. Let’s get into it.

His company, Swoop, had launched in Eswatini, a small landlocked country in Southern Africa, and reportedly grew to 22,000 users. 

Now it's coming to Lagos.

When news of Swoop’s raise broke, most of Africa’s tech ecosystem got pissed off for three main reasons

Aubrey's background isn't quietly privileged, it's loudly so. 

His father is a five-time US squash champion who once managed money for George Soros. 

His first business, started at 15, was a recruiting company connecting people in Eswatini to remote jobs in the US. 

By 19, he had dropped out of UC Berkeley, picked up the $250,000 Thiel Fellowship cheque, and moved to Lagos to chase the African super app.

So, a teenager who comes from money raised a lot of money, with no local experience in the country he's building for.

Sounds like a justified reason for anger, right?

To answer that, you need a sharper question.

The easy answer is race, and that’s not unfounded.

Africa’s disadvantage in raising venture capital is well-documented.

African founders building great solutions often have worse luck raising. And more often than not, it's because they're from the wrong time zone.

It's not overt. The trends just speak for themselves.

The problem is, racism is a fixed worldview. Calling something racist explains why it happens, but not how to fix it. And subtly reinforces the idea that nothing can change.

So let's reframe it.

There are two Africas in tech funding.

The first is the one local founder's experience. 

Raising money takes months, a barrage of due diligence, and hard proof you'll survive. 

This Africa cares little for your big idea, often discounts your traction, and is reluctant to open its wallet. 

The local founders who get the biggest cheques here come with extras: pedigree, connections, sometimes a foreign degree.

Then there's the second Africa. The "Africa Rising" edition. 

The one where telling a story about the African opportunity is enough, and a fruitful Silicon Valley trip is one alumni group chat away. 

The one where, if you fail, you can recount the time you tried to make an impact in Africa, and still get another shot.

Swoop is a product of the second Africa. 

After raising $7.3 million on the back of 22,000 users in Eswatini, an uncontested market, it's launching in Nigeria, Africa's biggest food delivery market.

And Nigeria is not without food-delivery incumbents.

Chowdeck is the country's fastest-growing food delivery app. It's a product of the first Africa.

In August 2025, Chowdeck closed a $9 million Series A. 

At that point, it served 1.5 million customers across 11 cities in Nigeria and Ghana, was growing 6x year-on-year, and was already profitable.

It only raised 1.2x the value of Swoop's seed round.

Back when Chowdeck raised its seed, it had already served 500,000 users in Nigeria. That's roughly 20x what Swoop had before raising. 

Chowdeck got $2.5 million for its seed round, a third of what Swoop just raised, even after getting into YC and competing with incumbents like Jumia and Glovo.

The disparity isn't new. We've written about it ourselves before. The usual explanations:

That last one, the "excellence argument", wasn't spared in defense of Swoop's raise.

Now, Aubrey has some wind beneath his wings. 

He's only 19, has built two companies, and dropped out for the Thiel Fellowship; possibly the world's most effective unicorn factory.

Given his profile, we can conclude that his achievements themselves are every bit about merit.

And we’d know, because Africa also has a lot of people like him.

Africa has founders who were doing excellent work before they turned 25. Some before they even turned 20.

Let’s name a few.

In 2014, at 17, Abdulhamid Hassan founded his first startup, Washify, an Uber for laundromats.

It didn't pan out, but it introduced him to Shola Akinlade, who would later co-found Paystack.

He moved to Latvia for a Computer Science degree, dropped out in his second year, then bounced through Egypt, the UAE, and France, building startups. 

In the UAE, he founded Hyphen.AI, a chatbot platform later acquired in 2017.

In 2019, he moved back to Nigeria and joined Paystack as a product manager, a company Stripe later acquired for $200 million.

In 2020, he founded Mono, an open banking startup. 

By 2025, Mono powered over 8 million bank account connections, roughly 12% of Nigeria's banked population.

In January 2026, Flutterwave acquired Mono in a deal valued at around $30 million.

Emmanuel Njoku started coding at 13. He got into engineering school at 16, but soon stopped attending classes to spend 12 hours a day writing code.

By 17, he was working remotely for international blockchain companies. By 19, he had cycled through MakerDAO (one of the world's largest DeFi protocols), Xend Finance, Instadapp, and Nestcoin.

That year, he turned down a $300,000 contract offer from Avarta to start Lazerpay, a crypto payment gateway.

Within months, Lazerpay had over 3,000 merchants processing payments across multiple African countries. The company raised $1.1 million. Then the crypto market crashed in 2022, the next round fell through, and Lazerpay shut down in April 2023.

Today, Emmanuel is building Ultramarkets, the first margin layer for prediction markets. He's 22.

David Nandwa started coding at 9. 

By 15, he was running businesses. By 19, he had built and exited two startups. One was an e-commerce platform that grew to nearly $1 million in ARR. 

He then spent two years at Flutterwave, where he saw how broken cross-border payments were for African businesses.

In 2020, at 19, he started HoneyCoin, a payment platform that connects banks, mobile money networks, and global payment partners. 

Today, it processes $150 million monthly in transactions, serves 350+ businesses and 326,000+ consumers across 15 African markets. It’s been profitable for two years.

In August 2025, HoneyCoin raised a $4.9 million seed round. David is 24.

Timi Ajiboye started coding at age 10. 

He later enrolled at the University of Lagos but dropped out. By then, he was already making a living as a freelance engineer. 

In 2017, he teamed up with Ire Aderinokun and Tomiwa Lasebikan to co-found BuyCoins, an early crypto exchange in Nigeria. 

BuyCoins got into Y Combinator's Summer 2018 batch. By 2019, it had moved $28 million in volume. A year later, that number exploded to $141 million.

At 15, Nathan Nwachukwu lost an eye in a tragic accident and was out of school for five months. 

While recovering, he started teaching physics online to make money, and found there was no good platform to do it on. 

Three years later, he launched Klas, a Shopify-for-education tool, after dropping out of Carleton University at 18 to join Techstars Toronto. Klas grew to 700,000 users.

In 2023, Nathan connected with Maxwell Maduka, an engineer who’d built drones for the Nigerian Navy. Together, they started Terra Industries in 2024.

The company makes drones, sentry towers, and unmanned ground vehicles that protect roughly $11 billion in critical infrastructure across Africa. 

In January 2026, Terra raised $11.75 million led by 8VC. 

A month later, it added a $22 million extension led by Lux Capital, bringing the round to $34 million at a $100 million valuation.

These aren’t fringe examples. But they prove one thing: African excellence isn’t rare.

But the outcomes around fundraising seem to skew towards founders with privilege, even after controlling for their merits.

So, when you strip away all the talking points used to explain the disparity, you're really left with one thing: bias.

The Journal of International Business Studies called it Investor Homophily. Oxford's Socio-Economic Review called it White-Male Bias. 

You can invent a new name for it, but it is what it is, and that’s okay, because…

The collective focus on fundraising rests on an unspoken belief that bigger cheques mean better odds. That hasn't been true.

Some of the biggest African startup failures came from the best-capitalised companies. 

Jumia raised hundreds of millions and even went public, but it's yet to turn a profit and had to shut down Jumia Food to cut its losses. 

Copia raised $123 million for rural e-commerce in Kenya, but shut down.

Meanwhile, six of Africa's nine unicorns were started by local founders.

This pattern isn't unique to Africa. 

In February 2026, a study reviewed 596 Indian high-tech startups founded between 2016 and 2023. 

Every unicorn in the dataset had domestic founders. Highest valuation, biggest round, only billion-dollar revenue company; all domestic. 

Returnees did enjoy one advantage: they raised capital earlier and more easily. Sound familiar?

But when it came to building companies that scale and win, it was a game of merit, not just access.

Local founders simply built better and more durable companies, and produced more unicorns too.

That's the right way to think about funding in Africa. 

It's a great tool for moving quickly, but local talent and context is supreme.

Some founders access it more easily than others. But in the end, the best founders tend to build the best companies.

And if there's anything we're sure of, it's that excellence has no zip code.

What do you think about Swoop’s landmark raise? Let me know here.

That’s it for this week. See you on Sunday for a breakdown on This Week in African Tech.

Cheers,

The Tech Safari Team

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