In 2025, African fintech startups raised $769 million in equity funding, 43% less than the year before. The figure comes from the 2025 Partech Africa Tech VC report, which found fintech’s share of equity funding had dropped to 32%, while cleantech grew 186% to $550 million.
For the sector that has defined African tech for a decade, that is a clear change in where investors put their money. Yet, what founders are building has not moved at the same pace. Of the more than 3,380 African tech products tracked by Liners, the platform founded by Kayode Faturoti where people find software built for Africa, 956 are fintech products. That is 28% of the total, and more than three times the next largest category.
The distance between those two numbers is one of the more useful things an investor or founder can look at right now.
Fintech Still Accounts for Nearly Three in Ten African Tech Products
The product counts in Liners’ African tech ecosystem data show how lopsided the continent’s software market is. After fintech’s 956 products, edtech follows with 278 and health tech with 175. Three more money-related categories, banking, insurtech and crypto, each list more than 130 products.
The same pattern shows up at the top of the market.
Eight of the nine African unicorns tracked on the platform are financial services companies: Flutterwave, OPay, Moniepoint, Interswitch, Wave, Chipper Cash, Halan and GoTyme Bank. The one exception is Andela, which connects African engineers with employers abroad.
A product count measures how many teams are building in a category, not how large those companies are or how much revenue they earn. What it does show is where founders have placed their bets, and for most of the past decade that bet has been on “moving money.”
Why Fintech Became the Default Bet for African Founders and Investors
The reasons are easy to trace. Payments touch every transaction in an economy, so a product that makes them faster or cheaper has customers in every sector from day one.
Revenue arrives as a fee on money that was going to move anyway, which makes the business model simple to explain to any investor.
Global investors have followed that logic well beyond Africa. TechBullion has reported that international investors took part in 47% of fintech funding rounds worldwide in 2024, up from 28% in 2019, according to CB Insights data. A founder pitching a payments or lending product is pitching into a category those investors already understand.
What this Means for the Next Wave of African Tech
For founders, a category with 956 products is a hard place to stand out.
New fintech companies now compete with established players that have licenses, distribution and brand recognition, and investors can compare them against dozens of similar pitches. The fintech founders most likely to raise from here are those building for a narrow customer the incumbents serve poorly, such as a specific trade, country or a specific type of business.
For investors, the product data points to categories where teams already exist but capital has not yet arrived at the same scale.
Edtech is the clearest example on the 2025 numbers. Education products often sell to parents, schools or governments with tight budgets, which makes revenue slower to build and harder to show at the seed stage. That is a reason to look closely at the category, since the teams are already there. Health tech is the example of what happens when capital does arrive: a smaller base of products drew more equity than several larger categories.
Capital has started to spread across more sectors of African tech. The next few years of product data will show whether founders follow it.
