For years, fintech wore the crown as Africa’s most funded technology sector, producing the continent’s biggest unicorns and pulling in the lion’s share of venture dollars. That reign has now been interrupted. A new report shows climate technology has pushed past fintech to become Africa’s leading venture funding sector, a shift that marks one of the most significant changes in the continent’s startup investment landscape in nearly a decade.
According to research released this week by London based research firm Briter, working alongside Catalyst Fund, BFA Global, FSD Africa and Africa: The Big Deal, climate tech companies across Africa raised roughly $6.35 billion between 2016 and 2025, spread across 779 companies. The pace of that growth tells the real story. In 2016, climate tech represented just 13 percent of total venture funding, or about $206 million. By 2025, that figure had jumped to 40 percent, translating to $1.5 billion raised in a single year, more than any other sector on the continent managed to attract.
The report, titled “The State of ClimateTech in Africa 2.0: Moving Beyond the Headline Numbers,” attributes the surge not just to bigger checks but to a widening base of investable companies. Researchers noted that the growth has come with a real expansion in both the number of funded startups and the volume of deals being signed, suggesting the momentum is structural rather than a one off spike driven by a handful of mega rounds.
Geographically, the money remains concentrated. Kenya, South Africa and Nigeria account for the bulk of the continent’s climate tech investment, with Kenya alone absorbing more than half of all capital that has flowed into the sector. Nigeria, despite being Africa’s most populous nation, trails behind as the second largest destination, having attracted about 12.9 percent of total continental investment in climate solutions between 2019 and 2025. That gap suggests Nigeria still has considerable ground to cover if it hopes to challenge Kenya’s dominance in the years ahead, even as its profile as a climate solutions hub continues to grow quietly in the background.
Nigeria’s identity as Africa’s fintech capital remains firmly intact for now. The country’s fintech sector generates upward of 14 billion dollars in revenue, growing at a compounded annual rate above 31 percent, a run fueled by a payments boom that produced unicorns like Flutterwave, OPay and Moniepoint. But the new data suggests that dominance may not be permanent if climate tech’s funding trajectory holds steady, since offshore investors appear increasingly drawn to the sector as their new area of interest.
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Part of what is driving this shift is the way emerging platforms are rethinking how climate solutions reach the ground. The report singled out Lagos based Winich Farms as an example of a company building on lessons learned from Kenya’s Twiga Foods, a business to business supply platform that struggled early on by assuming demand would simply follow once supply was available. Winich and similar operators are instead building market access, embedded finance and logistics into their models from the outset, helping them sidestep some of the costly infrastructure mistakes that slowed earlier movers in the space. That approach is helping link farmers directly with buyers rather than betting that connections will form organically.
The broader implication is that climate tech is no longer a niche category propped up by grant funding and development finance. It has become a mainstream investment thesis that mainstream venture capital is willing to back at scale, competing directly with fintech for the continent’s largest rounds. Whether this marks a permanent reordering of Africa’s tech investment hierarchy or a temporary swing tied to a strong funding year will likely become clearer as more data emerges through 2026, but for now, climate tech holds the top spot, and fintech has some catching up to do.
