Inside Africa’s ClimateTech Boom: What Has $6.35 Billion in Funding Actually Built?

A new cross industry study of Africa’s climate technology sector finds that a decade of funding, $6.35 billion in all, has been concentrated in a handful of companies and clusters, that startups stall for different reasons at different stages, and that the sector is not one market but a set of applications maturing at very different speeds.

For most of the past decade, the story of African venture capital was a fintech story. Payments apps and digital lenders drew the biggest checks and the loudest headlines. That story has quietly changed. A new report, The State of ClimateTech in Africa 2.0: Moving Beyond the Headline Numbers, finds that climate technology overtook fintech in 2025 to become the continent’s largest venture funding category, pulling in an estimated 1.5 billion dollars in a single year and accounting for close to 40 percent of all disclosed startup investment across Africa.

The report, published in June 2026, was developed by the market intelligence firm Briter in partnership with Catalyst Fund, BFA Global and FSD Africa, with funding data support from Africa: The Big Deal. It draws on more than 6.35 billion dollars in disclosed funding across 779 companies and over 1,400 deals between 2016 and 2025, alongside interviews with more than a dozen investors and founders across the continent.

The headline growth curve is dramatic on its own. Annual ClimateTech funding rose from 206 million dollars across 28 companies in 2016 to more than 1.5 billion dollars across 223 companies in 2025. But the report’s authors are explicit that the aggregate number obscures more than it reveals.

African ClimateTech is not developing as a single market. It is growing asynchronously, rapidly in some clusters, unevenly in others, and barely at all in several areas where the need is most acute.
The State of ClimateTech in Africa 2.0

A SECTOR NOBODY CAN CALL ONE MARKET

To make sense of that unevenness, the report builds a three level taxonomy. A Cluster is a broad sector, such as Energy, Mobility & Transport or Agriculture & Land Use. An Application is the specific way a company addresses a climate problem within that cluster, such as energy generation, light electric mobility or regenerative agriculture. A Solution is the underlying product or technology, such as a battery, an irrigation system or a digital forecasting platform.

The report defines the sector itself broadly. ClimateTech companies, in its words, are ventures that apply technological innovation, spanning asset heavy, science based, and digital business models, to climate mitigation and adaptation. The emphasis, the authors write, is on the application of the innovation rather than the sector label alone, because in the African context innovation often lies as much in the financing and delivery model as in the underlying technology.

That distinction matters because it lets the report compare companies that look similar on paper but face entirely different market conditions. Within Mobility & Transport, for instance, light electric mobility, largely electric motorcycles and delivery bikes, is scaling quickly through fleet based, asset backed financing, while electric buses in the same cluster remain stuck earlier in their development, dependent on government procurement and charging infrastructure that does not yet exist at scale.

BORROWING A LENS FROM CARLOTA PEREZ

To track how different parts of the ecosystem are evolving over time rather than just where they stand today, the report adapts economist Carlota Perez’s techno economic cycle framework, originally developed to explain how technological revolutions move from speculative bubbles to established industries.

The adapted version walks each Cluster and Application through five stages: Irruption, early and largely donor driven experimentation; Frenzy, when capital accelerates ahead of proven demand; Turning Point, when funders become more selective and weaker business models fall away; Synergy, when financing structures start to align with what companies actually need; and Maturity, when markets consolidate around a smaller number of established players.

Comparing the ecosystem in 2022 against 2025, the report finds that 13 of the 18 applications it tracks in detail advanced to a more developed stage in just three years, a sign the market is not stuck. But the pace varies enormously. Energy Generation, the report finds, has become the first ClimateTech application in Africa to reach Early Maturity, while two applications, alternative materials and waste to value, remained stalled at Irruption across both periods.

The most dramatic single movement was across Mobility & Transport as a whole. All three of its major applications, light electric mobility, road electric vehicles and buses, and charging and battery infrastructure, moved from Early Frenzy to Late Frenzy within the same three year window, with light electric mobility funding jumping from 61 million dollars in the six years before 2022 to 232 million dollars in the three years after.

The report reads that simultaneous acceleration as one of the strongest signals in the entire dataset that a segment of the market is approaching its own Turning Point, when investor selectivity intensifies and weaker platforms are likely to be squeezed out by better capitalised rivals.

THE CONCENTRATION PROBLEM

Perhaps the report’s starkest finding is how narrowly that 6.35 billion dollars has been distributed. The top 20 funded ClimateTech companies captured 60 percent of all funding raised since 2016, and the top 10 alone raised as much as every other company in the sector combined.

Energy accounted for roughly 65 percent of total ClimateTech funding between 2019 and 2025, with Energy Generation, essentially solar home systems, mini grids and commercial solar, representing nearly 60 percent of all capital deployed on its own.

Household names on that leaderboard include Sun King, d.light, CrossBoundary Energy, Spiro, M-KOPA and Twiga Foods, several of which have also featured in coverage from TechCabal Insights, which separately estimates that the five most funded African climate tech startups, Sun King, d.light, M-KOPA, Spiro and PEG Africa, have together raised 2.49 billion dollars since 2019, or roughly 44 percent of all climate tech capital deployed on the continent in that period. Both analyses point to the same pattern: capital gravitates toward asset heavy companies with large consumer bases and provable repayment histories, the profile debt investors find easiest to underwrite.

Mobility & Transport is the fastest moving part of the ecosystem by growth rate, even though it remains far smaller than Energy in absolute terms. Since 2016, mobility solutions have raised more than 728 million dollars, with funding increasing more than sixfold between 2022 and 2025 alone, and the number of active companies nearly tripling to 59 operating across 25 countries.

THE REPORT IN NUMBERS

Total disclosed ClimateTech funding, 2016-2025	$6.35 billion across 779 companies
Annual funding, 2016 vs 2025	$206m (28 cos.) vs $1.5bn (223 cos.)
Share of all African venture funding, 2025	Nearly 40 percent
Share captured by top 20 companies	60 percent
Energy’s share of funding, 2019-2025	About 65 percent
Women-only founding teams’ share of funding	Less than 1 percent
Adaptation solutions’ share of funding	16 percent (vs. 84 percent mitigation)
Disclosed exits, 2018-2026	206, mostly in Energy

CLUSTER BY CLUSTER: WHERE THE MONEY ACTUALLY GOES

Energy remains, by a wide margin, the most advanced cluster. Companies in the space have raised more than 4.1 billion dollars since 2016 across more than 200 companies, and development finance institutions, commercial banks and corporates now sit alongside venture capital in its funding rounds. Yet even Energy is not uniformly mature. Clean cooking and energy efficiency and management applications within the same cluster sit at a comparatively early Turning Point, still reliant on carbon credit revenue and grant support.

Investors interviewed for the report were blunt about what that maturity does and does not mean. “The industry has now experienced a number of write offs, losses, bankruptcies, and investors are looking at this with a sober eye,” said Marcus Watson, an investment director at KawiSafi Ventures, quoted in the report, adding that the sector needs to ask what level of subsidy is warranted to make energy access business models work at scale given that energy access functions, in his words, like a public good.

Agriculture & Land Use tells a different story. It is the most active cluster in the ecosystem by deal count, with 151 companies operating in 30 countries since 2016, but one of the most constrained by funding concentration, since only 29 of those companies have raised more than a million dollars each. Rose Goslinga, founder of the agricultural insurer Pula, pushed back in the report against reading that activity as more mature than it is.

Smart farming, I don’t think you can say that’s past Irruption. And climate data companies are still 90 percent grant reliant. We’re significantly overestimating where these solutions actually are.
Rose Goslinga, founder, Pula

The report traces a recurring pattern across agriculture, data and insurance applications: technical viability is not the same thing as commercial viability. Gro Intelligence, an agricultural data platform, raised more than 85 million dollars before shutting down in 2024, a failure the report attributes not to weak technology but to the absence of a deep enough pool of paying customers to support a venture scale business.

Pula’s own growth, by contrast, came from realizing that governments, not agribusinesses or smallholder farmers directly, were the more reliable payer for crop insurance at scale.

Food Systems & Value Chains shows a similar split within a single cluster. Supply chain and traceability platforms have progressed into Synergy, the report’s second highest stage, following a hard learned pivot at companies like Twiga Foods away from owning physical supply chains toward asset light, logistics focused models. Post harvest cooling and processing, by contrast, remains stuck at a Turning Point, still roughly 60 percent dependent on non commercial funding.

Carbon & Nature Based Solutions and Circular Economy & Waste sit earlier on the curve still. Carbon capture, utilisation and storage companies have raised just 21.2 million dollars across 13 companies, though more than 90 percent of that funding arrived in the last three years alone, suggesting the application is moving from Late Irruption into Early Frenzy.

The report highlights the contrasting fates of two carbon dependent companies in Kenya: Octavia Carbon, a direct air capture developer that insulated itself by selling forward removals directly to international corporate buyers, and KOKO Networks, a bioethanol cooking fuel company serving 1.3 million Kenyan households that had to shut down within days after government carbon credit authorisations did not arrive on schedule.

We need someone in between who can withstand some technology risk but deploy a lot more capital at low cost.
Duncan Kariuki, co-founder and CTO, Octavia Carbon

Built Materials and Water Access & Management remain the least developed clusters in the taxonomy. Built Materials has raised just over 10 million dollars across 20 companies since 2016, still competing against cement and other incumbent materials that benefit from mature supply chains and lower production costs.

Water Access & Management has raised 37 million dollars across 23 companies, a cluster the report says faces the same unresolved question as clean cooking and waste to energy: whether services long treated as government responsibilities and public goods can ever be fully monetised through private markets.

At some point, we may have to accept these require a subsidy. They should be considered a public good.
Marcus Watson, investment director, KawiSafi Ventures

Data & Finance, the report’s broadest and least sector specific cluster, illustrates a distinct challenge again. It covers climate analytics, agricultural insurance, conservation monitoring and sustainability reporting, and has raised 411.8 million dollars across 30 companies since 2016. Insurance and risk transfer looks, on paper, like one of the most advanced applications in the entire taxonomy, having reached Early Synergy with 296 million dollars raised across 18 companies and clear participation from commercial and institutional capital.

Yet interview participants questioned whether current adoption is deep enough to sustain that growth without continued institutional support. Climate data and forecasting, by contrast, has stalled: nearly 90 percent of its 107.7 million dollars in funding arrived before 2022, and only 18.4 million dollars has come in the three years since, a deceleration the report says reflects not declining relevance but an unresolved question of who actually pays for climate data at commercial scale.

David Longdon of Equator VC, quoted in the report, framed the issue as one of market size being measured the wrong way.

The market opportunity within some ClimateTech segments isn’t the total number of end users. It’s the number of organisations willing to pay or subsidise that product.
David Longdon, Equator VC

WHAT ACTUALLY GETS IN THE WAY OF SCALE

One of the report’s more counterintuitive findings is that technology risk, the thing most outsiders assume is the binding constraint on African ClimateTech, is often not the real problem. Carbon removal is a genuine exception, where the underlying science is still pioneering. But across most of the sector, the report argues, the core technologies, solar panels, batteries, irrigation systems, cold chain equipment, are already well understood and proven in other markets.

The harder question is whether the financing environment around a given business is mature enough to support it: whether working capital exists, whether procurement pathways are clear, whether customers can and will pay, and whether investors understand the specific risk profile involved.

Eghosa Omoigui of EchoVC put a similarly blunt frame on where companies actually get stuck, in remarks captured in the report:

Where we see companies get stuck, it’s mostly due to capital. Sometimes it’s regulatory, but it’s rarely technology. So redesigning capital programs from first principles and implementing and correctly sequencing tiered financing product SKUs become critical to survivability and long-term impact.
Eghosa Omoigui, EchoVC

The report also finds that companies rarely progress along a single financing track, moving neatly from grants to equity to debt as they mature. Instead they build capital stacks that evolve with their needs. By 2025, debt and hybrid instruments together accounted for nearly half of all ClimateTech funding value, up sharply from 2019, even though equity and grants still account for the majority of individual deals by count.

That divergence, the report explains, reflects a simple pattern: grants dominate deals below 500,000 dollars, while debt becomes increasingly prominent above 5 million dollars, as development finance institutions, banks and other institutional investors step in to provide structured capital to companies that have already proven a repeatable, asset backed business model.

TWO FOUNDERS’ HARD LESSONS IN COMMERCIALISATION

Two case studies in the report illustrate what that shift from grant dependence to commercial viability actually looks like on the ground. Mazao Hub, a Kenyan agricultural technology company, began as a mobile advisory app offering farmers recommendations on soil management and crop health. Co-founder and chief executive Geophrey Tenganamba recalled realising that information alone did not solve the underlying problem, since farmers who received good advice still lacked reliable access to fertiliser, suppliers and on the ground support.

The company restructured around a bundled model delivered through agro dealers, cooperatives and farmer groups, integrating advisory services, soil testing, input access and market linkages into a single revenue generating system. Since its founding, Mazao Hub has raised roughly 2.6 million dollars through a mix of grants, equity, accelerator support and venture building programmes.

Kubik, an Ethiopian company producing building materials from recycled plastic, faced a related reckoning. Its original product, technically sound, could not compete on price as cement grew cheaper while recycled plastic input costs rose.

Co-founder and chief executive Kidus Asfaw described the company’s pivot from a materials supplier to a broader waste management business, generating revenue from multiple outputs, including alternative fuel products for cement manufacturers, drawn from the same waste stream. Since 2022, Kubik has raised more than 5 million dollars in seed funding from investors including King Philanthropies and Satgana.

We had to flip the script, see ourselves as a waste management company first, and find the low-carbon value of that trash.
Kidus Asfaw, co-founder and CEO, Kubik

THE GENDER GAP AND THE ADAPTATION GAP

Two of the report’s findings speak less to market maturity than to who the market currently serves. Women only founding teams received less than 1 percent of total ClimateTech funding in the period studied, a figure the report links directly to where capital concentrates. Because large scale funding clusters in capital intensive sectors like Energy and Mobility, where women founders are underrepresented, women led companies end up concentrated instead in grant dependent, earlier stage segments of the ecosystem with smaller ticket sizes and fewer pathways into larger, more repeatable transactions.

Adaptation solutions, meaning technologies that help people, infrastructure and ecosystems withstand climate shocks rather than reduce emissions, tell a related story. They account for just 16 percent of total ClimateTech funding, against 84 percent for mitigation, and roughly 92 percent of debt and 82 percent of equity flows go toward mitigation specifically. The report attributes this less to the riskiness of adaptation technology itself and more to a less mature financing ecosystem around it, since many adaptation benefits are public in nature and difficult to monetise directly.

That imbalance echoes a wider pattern documented by the Climate Policy Initiative, whose Landscape of Climate Finance research has repeatedly found that adaptation finance to Africa lags far behind what the continent needs, with total climate finance flows still running at only a fraction of what meeting national climate plans would require.

LIQUIDITY, FINALLY, IF UNEVENLY

One of the more encouraging findings concerns exits. Between 2018 and 2026, the report counts 206 disclosed exits across African ClimateTech, with activity clearly accelerating in the most recent years. Energy again dominates, accounting for 15 of the 20 most prominent disclosed exits, following two distinct patterns: global corporate consolidation, such as Shell’s acquisition of Daystar Power and ENGIE’s acquisitions of Fenix International and Mobisol, and pan African platform consolidation, such as Sun King’s acquisition of PayGo Energy and Bboxx’s acquisition of PEG Africa.

Exit activity outside Energy remains thin but is beginning to diversify, the report notes, pointing to Sanlam Private Equity’s acquisition of the waste startup Skipwaste and Motorola Solutions’ acquisition of the health resilience company RapidDeploy as early signs that acquirer appetite is spreading beyond the most obvious cluster.

WHERE THIS FITS THE BIGGER PICTURE

The report’s findings track closely with what other trackers of African startup funding have been reporting in 2026. TechCabal Insights has separately reported that climate tech reached a record 1.18 billion dollars in African funding in 2025 and that debt financing, not equity, is increasingly driving the largest deals, a trend the Briter report itself confirms in more granular form, noting that debt and hybrid instruments together accounted for nearly half of total ClimateTech funding value by 2025, up from a far smaller share in 2019.

Research firm Lucidity Insights has documented a related resilience story: even as total African startup funding fell from roughly 4.7 billion dollars in 2022 to about 2.2 billion dollars in 2024 amid a broader venture capital pullback, climate tech’s share of that shrinking pie actually climbed, reaching 34 percent in 2024 and 38 percent in 2025, according to Lucidity Insights. In other words, when investors became more selective across the board, they became relatively more willing to back climate focused companies than most other categories.

Development finance institutions appear to be a meaningful part of that story. Techpoint Africa reported in early 2026 that DEG committed 35 million dollars to the Africa Go Green Fund in January and that Proparco invested 15 million dollars in the African Transition Acceleration Fund the following March, a vehicle aiming to mobilise roughly 200 million dollars in debt financing for distributed solar, clean cooking, electric mobility and energy efficiency projects, a financing model that maps closely onto what the Briter report calls tailoring capital stacks to what each application actually needs.

New early stage capital continues to enter the market too. South Africa’s Aions Ventures launched a 6 million dollar seed fund in June 2026 aimed squarely at climate technology, energy innovation and water sustainability startups, while Catalyst Fund, one of the co authors of the Briter report, has itself continued deploying its second climate focused fund to back early stage African founders, evidence that the pre seed and seed gap the report identifies is drawing at least some targeted response.

The policy backdrop remains unsettled. Coverage of the COP30 climate summit by the Institute for Security Studies noted that the conference delivered institutional progress on loss and damage financing but, in the analysis’s own words, fell short of a financial breakthrough, leaving African governments to convert accumulated climate ambition into credible, funded pathways largely on their own.

That gap between ambition and financing sits directly upstream of the private ClimateTech market the Briter report examines. A venture backed clean cooking company or water access startup depends, ultimately, on the same public procurement, subsidy and regulatory scaffolding that broader climate finance negotiations are meant to build.

FIVE IMPLICATIONS FOR THE ROAD AHEAD

The report closes with five recommendations aimed at investors, funders, policymakers and founders, all built around a single idea: that mature ClimateTech applications do not converge on one financing model, but on different capital stacks shaped by their technology risk, revenue model, infrastructure needs and how much of a public good they represent.

First, tailor capital stacks to what each application needs to progress, rather than trying to replace grants with commercial capital across the board. Second, use catalytic capital specifically where applications are most likely to stall, since the report finds financing gaps appear at multiple points along the maturity curve rather than in a single missing middle.

Third, build clearer pathways for local and institutional capital, since DFIs, donors and specialised climate funds cannot finance the sector’s full path to scale alone. Fourth, treat liquidity, including secondaries and partial investor exits and not just headline acquisitions, as part of ecosystem maturity rather than an afterthought.

And fifth, use policy deliberately to help applications progress, since for services tied to clean water, reliable energy, food production and resilience, the report argues, public support is not a distortion of the market but part of the capital stack that allows the market to exist at all.

Ultimately, African ClimateTech will not mature by converging on a single financing model, but by developing the right capital stacks, policy environment and market conditions for each Application to progress.
The State of ClimateTech in Africa 2.0

Taken together, the report offers a more complicated but more useful picture than the headline number it opens with. A sector that raised 1.5 billion dollars in a single year and overtook fintech as the continent’s most funded category is, by any measure, a success story. But success at that scale has not yet translated into success everywhere. Energy has built the infrastructure, the institutional buyers and the exit pathways to look genuinely mature.

Water access, built materials, and much of adaptation finance have not, and are unlikely to get there through venture capital alone. The next phase of African ClimateTech, the report suggests, depends on whether that capital finally starts arriving in the right shape, at the right stage, for the right reasons.

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