What is a standard Series A round size in Africa? $5m and $75m can both be right

Partech recorded 95 African Series A rounds averaging $7m in 2025, making $5m-$10m the strongest current shorthand range. But Workpay and Nawy show why the headline can deceive: Workpay raised $5m for sequenced software expansion, while Nawy’s widely cited $75m package included $23m of mortgage debt. The right raise depends on the proof a company must create, the cost of getting there and which spending genuinely requires equity.

In August 2024, Nairobi-based Workpay had more than 1,000 business customers across 20 African countries. It had added nearly 500 customers in 16 months. Its revenue had grown 1.5 times in the first half of that year.

That sounds like the moment to go big.

Workpay, which provides payroll and HR software, could have treated its presence in 20 countries as a reason to raise enough money to race into 40. Instead, it raised a $5m Series A led by Norrsken22, the investor leading the round, with Visa participating. The company chose to sequence expansion and broaden from payroll into HR and financial services.

Nine months later, Egyptian property technology company Nawy announced a $75m Series A. Except that was not quite what happened. Nawy raised $52m in equity, meaning money exchanged for ownership, and $23m in debt earmarked for its mortgage business.

One company raised $5m. The other announced $75m. Yet comparing those figures as if they answered the same question is like comparing the price of a bicycle with the price of a delivery van and concluding that one shopper overpaid.

Workpay’s $5m round shows that sequenced expansion can reduce the capital needed across multiple markets. Photo: jamies.x. co / Pexels, Pexels licence (free commercial use).

The question is not: what is the standard Series A in Africa?

It is: what proof must this company create before another investor will finance it again?

The neat answer that can make a mess

Partech, the publisher of the 2025 Africa Tech Venture Capital Report, recorded 95 African Series A rounds averaging $7m. It found 51 rounds between $5m and $10m.

That makes $5m-$10m the best current shorthand. It is a useful starting point for a board discussion. It is not a target to paste into a pitch deck.

Most founders do the opposite. They find the market average first, decide that it sounds plausible, then work backwards to make the plan fit the round.

This is backwards.

The raise should be built from the ground up:

Cash needed to reach the next fundable milestone + one-off costs + fundraising contingency − cash already held − credible operating inflows.

Imagine you are planning a difficult journey. You do not fill the tank because another driver did. You work out where you are going, how much fuel the route requires and whether the next petrol station may be closed when you arrive.

A startup’s next milestone could be revenue, repeat customer behaviour, regulatory permission, lower loan defaults, profitable distribution or evidence that a new market can be repeated. The point is not that every company needs the same milestone. It is that every company needs one a future investor can independently assess.

The interesting part is that even the datasets do not measure exactly the same thing. AVCA, which publishes African private-capital data, reported a $7m median Series A in 2023. Its broader early-stage category had a median of $11m in its latest 2025 data. Partech counted 95 Series A rounds in 2025, while AVCA’s classification produced a smaller early-stage universe.

Neither dataset needs to be wrong. They can differ because of stage definitions, deal-size thresholds, extensions, debt and undisclosed transactions.

The average is real. The target is not.

Nairobi. Photo: This Photo was taken by Timothy A. Gonsalves. Feel free to use my photos, but please mention me as the author. I would / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0.

The label can hide the real financing story

Carry1st, the Cape Town gaming publisher, shows why labels are a poor way to set a fundraising goal.

It announced an initial $6m Series A in May 2021. A $20m Series A extension followed in January 2022. Another $27m came in 2023.

So what was Carry1st’s Series A? $6m? $20m? $26m? The answer changes according to whether a database counts an initial close, an extension or the accumulated capital.

Its business was changing too. Carry1st moved from developing its own games towards publishing, local distribution and Pay1st, its payments infrastructure. The financing sequence reflected a changing operating model, not merely a larger appetite for cash.

Put Workpay and Carry1st side by side and a pattern appears that none of the headline reports spells out: round size is often a rough measure of how many expensive unknowns remain between a company and repeatable growth.

Workpay chose to reduce those unknowns through sequenced expansion. Carry1st’s evolving model required a different path.

LAfricaMobile, the Dakar cloud-communications company, offers another version. It announced $4.6m in May 2024 for Central African expansion and product development, then subsequently closed its Series A at approximately $7m. Its capital plan was shaped by Francophone expansion, enterprise sales cycles and telecom integration.

A round is not always a single moment. Sometimes it is a sequence of decisions.

An app can still be a very physical business

Djamo, the Côte d’Ivoire financial-services company, raised a $14m Series A in 2022. In April 2025, it raised a further $17m equity round. It then reported more than one million customers across Côte d’Ivoire and Senegal, and said its valuation had doubled.

Those are impressive figures. But the fact that changes how you read them is less glamorous.

Djamo did not rely only on its app. It used offline agents as well. The company accepted that digital banking adoption required physical distribution.

Agents cost money. Managing them costs money. Entering regulated markets costs money. This is where most people stop looking: they see an app, assume software economics and expect software-sized capital needs.

AfricInvest investor Lavanya Anand told Disrupt Africa that an African Series A software company might typically show $2m-$3m in annual recurring revenue, or subscription income expected to repeat each year, alongside credible margins and unit economics. That is a useful software test.

It is not a universal entrance exam.

For a fintech, investors may instead examine transaction activity, retention, default risk, fraud controls, compliance, treasury and regulation. For a gaming company, publishing and distribution may matter. For a marketplace, the question may be whether demand repeats without ever more expensive incentives.

The proof must fit the business. So must the raise.

The $75m round that was not a $75m equity cheque

Nawy reported more than 50-fold dollar-revenue growth over four years despite a 69% depreciation of the Egyptian pound. In May 2025, it raised $52m in equity and $23m in debt for its mortgage business.

Debt is borrowed money that must be repaid. Nawy did not use equity to fund its whole balance sheet. It matched mortgage assets with debt.

Here is the twist: treating Nawy’s package as a $75m equity Series A makes Workpay’s $5m look unusually small. Treating it as $52m of ownership capital plus $23m of mortgage finance reveals two companies buying fundamentally different things.

This distinction matters for founders. Equity is expensive in a particular way: it gives away ownership forever. Debt has repayment obligations, but it can be a more fitting tool when it is tied to assets such as mortgages.

Do not add both together, call the result a benchmark and use it to judge a software company. That is not comparison. It is category error with a very large number attached.

The warning inside a large cheque

54gene, the Nigeria-based genomics company, announced a $15m Series A in April 2020. Its announcement is documented by PR Newswire. The research record supplied for this article also states that the company later raised a $25m Series B, began winding down in 2023 and faced reported pressures including capital-intensive laboratories, biobanking, diagnostics expansion, declining COVID-testing revenue, governance conflict, failed follow-on fundraising and a reported valuation fall from $175m to $50m in a down round.

There is an important reporting limitation here. The supplied brief provides a verifiable PR Newswire source for the 2020 Series A, but it does not provide named, independently verifiable source links for the later governance-conflict, valuation or wind-down claims. Those later claims should therefore not be used as standalone evidence for a causal conclusion.

The broader lesson still holds without pretending otherwise: money spent on costly infrastructure is not automatically proof of a durable business. A company needs expenditure to create commercial evidence that another financier can underwrite.

That is why funding the proof, not the fantasy is a stronger discipline than chasing a continental average.

GI Network's view: A strong Series A case does not say, “We are raising $7m because that is the African average.” It says, “This money buys these milestones, those milestones remove these risks, and the ownership given up is proportionate to the proof created.”

Dakar. Photo: Jeff Attaway from Abuja, Nigeria / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 2.0.

Make the calculation before the pitch deck

A founder can make this practical with a simple milestone ledger.

Take an illustrative example. A company needs $2.4m for staff and product work, $1m to launch a new market, and $600,000 for compliance and one-off setup costs. It wants a $1m contingency because fundraising may take longer than hoped. That is $5m of required cash.

It already holds $1.2m and expects $800,000 of operating inflows that are genuinely credible, not merely projected. The proposed equity raise is therefore:

$5m − $1.2m − $800,000 = $3m.

Now change one assumption. Suppose $1m of the market-expansion budget is actually financing against a specific asset and can properly be covered by debt. The equity need falls to $2m, while the company separately assesses whether debt repayment is safe.

That is the Proof-Path Test at work. Not theory. A worksheet.

The 18-24-month runway target should be treated as a minimum financing horizon, not a guarantee that a Series B will arrive on time. AVCA found its successful 2023-2024 cohort reached Series B in a median 16 months. Yet Partech’s broader analysis put the average Series A-to-B interval at 12 quarters, or three years, by 2025.

Different samples. Same warning.

Fundraising can take longer than the model says.

Reported ARR is a metric; bankable ARR is a verdict explains why projected revenue should not automatically be treated as cash the company can safely spend.

What founders should do differently

Start with one sentence: “At the end of this round, we will have proved ______.” If that blank cannot be completed clearly, the funding ask is probably too vague.

Then cost the path honestly. Include people, product, sales, distribution, market entry, compliance and exceptional spending. Separate operating growth from asset finance. Test a delayed fundraise rather than assuming a future round turns up exactly on schedule.

Finally, model ownership. A planning range of 15%-25% dilution can be useful, but it is not an Africa-wide rule. Carta, the provider of US startup ownership data, recorded median Series A dilution of 17.9% in the first quarter of 2025, down from 20.1% a year earlier. That is US context, not an African valuation benchmark.

At 20% dilution, a $7m raise implies a $35m post-money valuation and a $28m pre-money valuation. That is arithmetic. It does not prove the company can grow into that price.

How much company you give up for growth capital matters because the least dilutive round today can become the most difficult one to support later.

What experienced investors are really checking

Investors are not deciding only whether they like a founder or a market. They are deciding whether the cash will create enough value for their ownership to matter after later rounds reduce it.

They ask what the money buys, how long it lasts under a cautious plan, what evidence will persuade the next investor and whether the company has confused equity needs with debt needs.

They also think about reserves: money held back to support companies that perform well in later rounds. Put too much into the first round and there may be less to support winners later. Put too little aside and the investor may lose ownership just as the company proves itself.

GI Network would turn this into a capital case before investor outreach: identify the structural weakness in the operating plan, test whether the stated milestone can be financed by the projected cash flows, separate equity from debt or other capital needs, model dilution at several raise sizes, map capital providers suited to the company’s sector and geography, and rehearse the objections an investment committee will raise about follow-on financing.

Use the Proof-Path Test

Before naming a Series A number, run five questions.

1. 1.Proof: What single milestone makes the company independently financeable again?
2. 2.Path: What does it truly cost to reach that milestone, including one-off needs and fundraising delay?
3. 3.Capital: Which costs require equity, and which could properly be financed with debt or another instrument?
4. 4.Ownership: Does the proposed dilution leave founders and investors with a workable path through later rounds?
5. 5.Next buyer: What evidence will make the next investor say yes?

A $5m round that passes the Proof-Path Test is stronger than a $7m round built around a continental average. And a $14m round can be exactly right if the proof genuinely costs $14m.

Do not raise the standard amount. Raise the amount that gets you, credibly, to the next buyer of risk.