RANGE VENTURES — RESEARCH
Every dataset I've built on African tech - funding, fintech, demographics, exits. All of it free, no gate. Leave your email if you want the monthly memo and new datasets before they go public.
Built by hand, checked against primary sources, and dated — because a valuation or a funding total is a timestamp, not a permanent fact. Every file names where the numbers came from.
$445.3M went into African electric two-wheelers and battery-swap networks in the first nine months of 2026, roughly a quarter of every startup dollar raised on the continent. Seven rounds, six companies, and development finance in five of them. Every company's funding history back to 2016, the country-by-country policy table, and the three places where published totals contradict each other.
Ten companies, $17.5B combined - with the date each valuation was actually last set. Nine confirmed marks, one reported. Half of them are older than 2024, which is the part everyone skips.
42 local, 39 pan-African, 18 international. Stage focus, what each has actually backed here, and a pipeline tracker with status, intro path and next step. No DFIs, no banks, no growth PE.
207 companies across 13 sub-sectors, from Flutterwave and Yoco to the seed-stage names most people outside the continent have never heard of.
882 million more people in twenty-four years, and what that does to distribution, compute and labour. Every figure checked against the UN World Population Prospects 2024.
Africa will have six megacities by 2050. Venture capital is funding two of them. Luanda and Kinshasa hold 22 million people between them and do not appear in this year's funding tables at all.
136 million people, a national digital ID with 50 million enrolments, and under $80M of foreign venture capital across two years - less than a single Lagos Series B. The rails are laid; the traffic has not arrived.
Missing a fund, a company or a market you know well? Tell me and it goes in the next version.
Not a newsletter. One email a month, written the way I'd write to an investor in the fund — short, specific, and honest about what I don't know yet.
How many pitches, which patterns repeated, and what I passed on, with the reason.
The numbers behind the month's headlines, sourced, plus what changed in the datasets above.
Where I think the market is mispriced, and where I might be wrong about it.
Founder, Range Ventures — Cape Town
Founder turned investor. I've built and scaled companies across five continents — Milan, Bangkok, Miami, Singapore, Cape Town — and I now spend my time on early-stage African tech. These datasets are the research I do anyway; publishing them costs me nothing and saves you a week.