Where's the door?

Hey, Sheriff here 👋 

A few weeks ago, Nigeria’s fintech ecosystem scored a new exit. There was a lot of fanfare, followed by some scrutiny.

Some thought it was great, others thought it left much to be desired.

So, this week, we’re trying to answer the question: "What makes a good exit in Africa?”

Let’s start with a backstory…

In 2023, Tunisian Startup Instadeep sold to BioNTech for $680 million.

The company had been alive for nine years, and built AI software that allowed big pharma make better decisions.

It was the biggest African startup acquisition at the time, and remains so today. 

But ever since, the conversation around exits in Africa has taken an interesting shape.

Some people think Africa is starving for exits like Instadeep. Others think we’re too early to talk about them. And some think the exits we see are too small to matter.

Three weeks ago, the conversation bubbled up again with the acquisition of Mono.

The Nigerian open banking startup got acquired by Flutterwave for $30 million.

Expectedly, people zoomed straight to the numbers: how much Mono raised, how much Mono exited for, and then lined it up against some imaginary future where it should’ve sold for a bigger number.

But beneath all this noise, one has to ask: what’s the point of this debate?

African tech became a number-go-up sport 

Somewhere along the line, African tech has quietly morphed into a scoreboard ecosystem.

Funding rounds have become league tables, a signal that a startup is playing the right games and scoring the right wins. And exits are treated like final exam scores.

If the number is big, everyone cheers. If it’s small, people swing into advice mode.

It’s a Silicon Valley way of seeing the world, where the best possible outcome is a huge payday. But Africa isn’t Silicon Valley. 

The biggest problems being solved in Africa aren’t convenience problems. They’re foundational, mostly intended to work around broken infrastructure. 

Things like power, payments, identity, credit, and trade logistics.

They’re the boring, foundational stuff that entire economies quietly sit on.

There’s also another problem with the number-go-up frenzy. When people focus on funding, we miss the real point: startups are businesses meant to make money and impact. 

In Africa, impact looks like solving foundational problems affecting millions of people, and funding is only a byproduct.

When you judge exits only by their dollar value, you miss the real question: what foundational thing did this company do?

Let’s go back to Mono

On paper, you can reduce Mono’s story to a single line: raised $17.6 million, exited at around $30 million.

But that misses the whole point. Mono’s real work was much deeper. 

It helped connect millions of African bank accounts through APIs, making it easier for other startups to build lending, credit scoring, and financial products on top.

In a continent where formal credit remains painfully limited, and fewer than 10% of people can access it, that kind of infrastructure is oxygen. 

You can’t build modern fintech without pipes that connect data, identity, and financial history.

Mono helped lay the infrastructure for identity and credit in African fintech.

If you look only at the exit value, you miss the ecosystem effect. Or the startups that exist because those rails exist. 

Or the loans that get issued because that data can now move. Or the risk models that get built because the fintechs don’t have to find all the data themselves.

That value is far larger than a single acquisition price.

There’s another side of this debate that we call…

The myth of the rare exit

Another reason this debate gets distorted is that people think exits in Africa are rare, freak events.

They’re not. They’re just not always loud.

Most African exits are:

• Strategic acquisitions.
  

• Secondary share sales.
  

• or acqui-hires.

In 2025, Africa saw 60+ exits, up 43% from 2024. Most don’t make the headlines because they’re under wraps. 

But they’re evidence of a consistent pattern. Companies are teaming up, bigger companies are absorbing smaller ones, and liquidity is being created.

Most of the exits in 2025 didn’t come from large corporate buyouts, but from startups buying other startups.

That’s a signal that the infrastructure circle of life is growing. Startups are building rails for other startups to grow on. 

That’s ecosystem maturity.

Here’s what African exits really tell us

Look at a few examples across the continent:

• Paystack/Flutterwave → infrastructure for online commerce

• Mono → infrastructure for identity and credit

• InstaDeep → infrastructure for advanced AI in pharma and research

• BuuPass → infrastructure for digitising public transport in Kenya

Notice the pattern?

These companies didn’t just grow fast. They built critical rails in markets where those rails barely existed before.

And when an exit happens, it often means one thing:

That piece of infrastructure has matured enough to be absorbed into something bigger.

And it now has a shot at becoming a permanent fixture in the ecosystem.

In Silicon Valley, exits often monetize scale.

In Africa, exits signal the success of foundational systems.

This is important because Africa is still in an era of firsts.

Many of the biggest companies in African tech were the first to crack the core problems in their space.

And their customers are the first generation of Africans for whom these tech-enabled products have been made possible.

Looking at it this way, the question of scale and massive exits looks premature.

An exit, in this context, is not the end of the story. It’s a handoff.

A signal that an experiment worked, a new rail was built, and a piece of infrastructure and knowledge is ready to support something bigger.

That’s worth far more than a flashy headline number.

So, where’s the door?

When people ask, “Was that a good exit?” they usually mean, “Was the number big enough?”

But that turns tech into a spectator game where we only cheer on the wild successes and miss the real long-term wins.

It also flattens the work done by founders and teams of operators over many years into a single number.

Perhaps the better questions are:

• Did this company leave the ecosystem stronger than it found it?

• Did it unlock new markets, products, or behaviors?

• Did it make the next generation of startups easier to build?

In Africa, nearly every meaningful exit so far has done exactly that.

So yes, we need more exits. More liquidity. More recycled capital.

But we also need to get smarter about what we’re measuring.

Because in this ecosystem, the door isn’t just a cash-out.

It’s often the moment a critical piece of Africa’s digital infrastructure becomes strong enough to carry the future.

What do you think about the exit debate in Africa’s tech ecosystem?

Let us 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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