From Moniepoint to Moove: Africa Has Two New Unicorns. Who Completes the Hat-Trick?

On Wednesday, August 5, Moove announced it had raised $250 million at a $2.1 billion valuation in a Series C round led by Abu Dhabi's Mubadala Investment Company. With that, the Nigerian-founded mobility company became Africa's newest unicorn and the continent's first autonomous mobility company to cross the billion-dollar line.

It is the second time in under two years that Africa has produced a new unicorn. Moniepoint crossed the threshold in late 2024, backed by Development Partners International and Google's Africa Investment Fund in a $110 million Series C that valued the company at over $1 billion. Both milestones arrived during one of the most disciplined and cautious periods in global venture capital history, which makes each one matter more than the numbers suggest.

The question the continent's tech ecosystem is now asking is a simple one: who is third?

For beginners, a "Unicorn" in Startup Language Is a Company Valued at $1 Billion or More.

In Africa, those companies are still rare enough that each new one makes headlines.

Between 2020 and 2022, African tech went through one of the fastest investment booms in its history. Global investors poured billions into startups across Nigeria, Kenya, Egypt, and South Africa. Fintech dominated headlines, venture firms chased the next Flutterwave, Wave, Chipper Cash, or Andela, and unicorn conversations became routine.

The global market correction changed that almost overnight. As inflation and interest rates rose, venture firms grew more cautious. Startups that previously raised capital aggressively found fundraising slower and more demanding. Investors who once prioritized user growth began asking harder questions about profitability, cash flow discipline, and whether the underlying business model could survive without continuous external funding.

According to African Business, funding into African unicorns and late-stage startups slowed sharply through 2025 as investors concentrated capital around fewer, financially stronger businesses.

That slowdown exposed structural weaknesses that had been building for years. Many startups had scaled without proving sustainable monetization. Others depended on continuous fundraising to stay afloat, or expanded into multiple markets before establishing stable economics in even one.

What investors now favor are businesses deeply integrated into economic systems: companies that are hard to remove from everyday commercial activity, not necessarily the loudest names in the room.

The Nxt Box spoke to some Industry watchers, who agreed that the threshold for reaching unicorn status has shifted significantly. "The bar for a billion-dollar valuation has gone up because of the funding crash," says Faith Omoniyi, Head of Content at Briter, a data and intelligence platform tracking the African tech ecosystem. "Investors are now more cautious. There is more scrutiny and a bigger emphasis on unique economics. They are checking your books more often, checking that the business model is sound, that everything makes sense."

Samson Akintaro, Tech Analyst at Nairametrics, puts it plainly: "Investors are now carrying out more due diligence before committing to invest. Any startup seeking funding must first put its house in order and keep its books clean."

Akintaro also makes the point that unicorn status, once achieved, is not guaranteed to last. "It is not a permanent title," he says. "If a one-time unicorn needs more funding amid an unfavorable market condition and has to sell its shares at a lower price, then the company's valuation can drop." That reality is already playing out for some of Africa's earliest unicorns, including Chipper Cash, which peaked at $2 billion in 2021 and has since seen its valuation fall sharply following the collapse of its backer FTX.

How Moniepoint Got There First

Moniepoint's rise was not built on consumer hype or aggressive subsidies. Its growth came from operational depth: the company embedded itself quietly into the financial infrastructure of Nigerian commerce through agency banking, merchant services, SME-focused financial tools, payment systems, bookkeeping, and business banking products.

By the time investors led by Development Partners International and Google's Africa Investment Fund backed its $110 million Series C round, Moniepoint was reportedly processing more than 800 million monthly transactions worth over $17 billion. Those were not vanity metrics. They reflected real economic activity flowing through the company's systems, which is precisely why the valuation held up where others had not.

Moniepoint's milestone in late 2024 reopened a question the ecosystem had grown quieter about during the slowdown: who would be next? Most analysts pointed to one company above all others.

Moove Just Answered That Question

"After Moniepoint, it is Moove," Faith Omoniyi told The Nxt Box earlier this week. "If they raise their next round, they might raise at a billion valuation, and that earns them unicorn status."

The round closed before the week ended, and it more than doubled the threshold.

Moove was founded in Lagos in 2020 by Ladi Delano and Jide Odunsi with 76 vehicles and a focused mission: help ride-hailing and delivery drivers across Africa access vehicles they could not afford through traditional lenders. Across many African economies, gig workers and independent drivers with stable earnings were routinely excluded from formal credit systems. Moove offered revenue-based financing tied directly to what drivers earned, making the model both practical and scalable.

Six years later, the company operates a fleet of approximately 42,000 vehicles across 14 countries, employs 3,300 people globally, and generates $420 million in annual recurring revenue. It has expanded through organic growth and acquisitions, including Kovi in Brazil and Tokyo Taxi in Japan, and is now headquartered in Dubai.

Akintaro, speaking to The Nxt Box this week before the announcement, had placed Moove's valuation at approximately $750 million and named it among the three contenders most likely to cross the line. The Series C confirmed it, then more than doubled it.

The Pivot Nobody Fully Saw Coming

What makes Moove's unicorn moment particularly significant is not the valuation alone. It is what the company has become.

Beginning in 2023, Moove moved deliberately into autonomous vehicle fleet operations, evaluating the emerging robotaxi industry and identifying a structural gap nobody else was filling. AV developers, vehicle manufacturers, ride-hailing marketplaces, and consumers all had defined roles in the autonomous mobility ecosystem. None of them wanted to own and manage the physical vehicles.

Moove did.

"Who owns the vehicle? Who operates the vehicle? Who orchestrates the vehicle? Who does the servicing, the maintenance?" co-founder and co-CEO Ladi Delano told TechCrunch. "It became clear that Moove's experience managing large fleets and providing financing could translate to autonomous vehicle operations."

The company now serves as the fleet operator for Waymo in Phoenix, Miami, and Las Vegas, with London next. It intends to eventually purchase robotaxis outright using debt financing, with a long-term vision of owning hundreds of thousands of autonomous vehicles globally.

Part of the new capital will go toward developing what Moove calls "Nests": automated, robotics-first depot facilities where autonomous fleets will be charged, serviced, and maintained around the clock. The company currently has about 15 depots in various stages of development, and the funding will support the hiring of approximately 350 people to scale the autonomous vehicle side of the business.

Moove's traditional mobility business is separately on track to achieve full profitability this year.

The Series C round brought in Woven Capital (Toyota's growth fund) and Ion Pacific as co-leads, alongside BlackRock, MUFG, Franklin Templeton, Uber, BlueCrest Capital Management, Left Lane, Endeavor Catalyst, and the Ontario Power Generation Pension Plan, among others.

So Who Is Third?

Moove's confirmation raises the stakes for the rest of Africa's soonicorn pipeline. Omoniyi and Akintaro both pointed to a clear set of contenders in their conversations with The Nxt Box.

PalmPay sits closest to the threshold among the remaining candidates. Industry estimates reportedly put its valuation between $800 million and $900 million. The company scaled inside one of the most crowded fintech categories on the continent, but found room through a distribution advantage rooted in its relationship with Transsion, the Chinese smartphone manufacturer behind Tecno and Infinix. PalmPay reportedly benefited from app pre-installation across millions of devices sold across African markets, giving it early visibility among first-time smartphone users. 

Its bigger strategic move was transitioning from a payments app into a broader financial ecosystem, expanding into merchant services, savings, credit, SME support, and everyday consumer financial tools. PalmPay reportedly now serves over 35 million users and around one million businesses.

"PalmPay is close with roughly $900 million, and the company is also in discussions to raise additional funding, which may happen this year and push it to unicorn status," Akintaro told The Nxt Box.

Spiro was the name both analysts raised independently as the wildcard. The electric motorcycle startup operates across francophone Africa, including Benin, Rwanda, Kenya, and Togo, deploying electric motorcycles and battery-swapping infrastructure to replace petrol-powered boda bodas and okadas.

"At the top of my head, one African startup that may become the next unicorn this year is the electric mobility startup, Spiro," Akintaro says. "The company has racked up $270 million in recent times to push its valuation very close to $1 billion."

Omoniyi echoed that view, flagging EV mobility alongside logistics as the sectors most likely to produce the continent's next non-fintech unicorn.

Yassir, the Algerian super app, presents a different kind of story. Founded in 2017, the company built its business on ride-hailing before expanding into food and grocery delivery and financial services, becoming the dominant digital platform across the Maghreb. It operates in 45 cities across six countries. The company reportedly closed an internal Series C worth roughly $105 million in 2025, and industry reports suggest that round pushed its valuation past $1 billion. Yassir has not confirmed this publicly.

That ambiguity is itself telling. Where Moniepoint and Tyme announced their unicorn status directly, Yassir's possible billion-dollar valuation has barely registered outside specialist coverage. Its most recent move, the acquisition of Uno, an Algerian hypermarket chain rebranded as Yassir Market, came weeks after Jumia exited the Algerian market entirely, leaving Yassir positioned to absorb that commercial gap.

LemFi started as a remittance service for African immigrants abroad and has since expanded into financial infrastructure built around migration itself. Millions of Africans now work, study, and run businesses across multiple countries, but cross-border financial services remain fragmented and expensive. LemFi recognised early that diaspora financial needs extended far beyond sending money home, covering multicurrency banking, international payments, savings, and credit. According to World Bank estimates, Sub-Saharan Africa receives over $50 billion annually in remittance inflows, and startups capable of controlling more of that movement are becoming increasingly attractive to investors. LemFi recently acquired UK fintech Pillar to expand into credit.

M-KOPA has made its case from Kenya. The company built pay-as-you-go financing for smartphones, solar products, and household assets, letting consumers pay gradually rather than in large upfront amounts. It targets one of Africa's deepest structural problems: millions of consumers excluded from traditional credit despite consistent repayment behavior. M-KOPA uses behavioral data, alternative credit scoring, and digital repayment tracking to extend credit at scale. The company reportedly raised around $166 million in a Series F round and has reached profitability. 

Not Every Soonicorn Is Moving in the Same Direction

Kuda's story sits differently from the others. The Nigerian digital bank built its early growth on offering Nigerians a no-fee alternative to traditional banking, reaching millions of customers and processing billions of dollars in transactions. But Kuda's last disclosed valuation of $500 million from a 2024 raise sits well behind the others, and its recent trajectory has pointed toward consolidation rather than expansion. In March 2026, the company cut more than 100 jobs as part of a restructuring aimed at reaching profitability.

Kuda's inclusion in soonicorn conversations says less about imminent unicorn status and more about how wide the gap has become between the startups pulling ahead and those still working to prove their model can sustain itself.

The Soonicorn Pipeline at a Glance

Note: Moove, previously tracked at $750M, officially crossed the unicorn threshold on August 5, 2026, at a confirmed $2.1 billion valuation. Valuations and funding totals for remaining companies are based on the most recent figures reported by TechCrunch, the Financial Times, Bloomberg, TechCabal, and Launch Base Africa as of August 2026. Private company valuations are rarely confirmed by the companies themselves and should be read as informed estimates.

Infrastructure Is Becoming Africa's Most Valuable Tech Layer

The biggest pattern emerging across Africa's unicorn pipeline is this: infrastructure is replacing visibility as the ecosystem's most valuable currency.

Moniepoint didn't win on brand. Moove didn't win on consumer popularity. Both built systems that became load-bearing inside larger economic activity, and investors rewarded that depth over noise.

PalmPay, Spiro, LemFi, and M-KOPA are following variations of the same playbook. None of them dominate social media conversations the way consumer fintech apps do, but they increasingly power critical layers of commerce underneath the surface. Infrastructure businesses tend to produce stronger retention: once payment APIs, merchant systems, or transaction rails get embedded into a business's operations, replacing them becomes expensive and operationally risky. That means stronger switching costs, deeper integrations, and steadier long-term revenue.

Omoniyi argues that the ecosystem has also matured past chasing paper milestones. "People have realized that at the end of the day, you are doing this for the exit," he says. "When you get overvalued, your exit chances are slim. On the continent, M&A has driven most exits, companies buying other companies. So people are now optimizing for exit from day one, which means valuations are becoming more reasonable." For companies like Flutterwave, already at $3.3 billion following its recent Series E, he notes the exit route narrows significantly: "Their exit is most likely an IPO, or one of the bigger global tech companies buys them."

He also points to a structural shift in how African startups are being funded. Nearly 50% of capital deployed into African startups last year came from VCs headquartered on the continent. "As more VCs on the continent raise money and we have more local capital, they can support these businesses," Omoniyi says. "That will help build more resilient businesses."

After years of a funding slowdown, two unicorns in under two years suggests the momentum has returned. Whether PalmPay, Spiro, or Yassir completes the hat-trick may depend less on market conditions than on which company first proves it has become truly impossible to replace.