African startups raised $575 million across 58 deals in January and February 2026, according to TechCabal Insights.
The headline number is strong but the shift underneath it is more telling.
Fintech led all sectors in January with $131.6 million. By February it had dropped to fourth place at $54.1 million. Logistics and transport took the top spot in February with $119.6 million. Energy and water followed at $94 million.
The decline is not a one-month anomaly.
After years of absorbing the majority of venture capital flowing into the continent, fintech is losing its dominance to sectors that touch physical infrastructure.
Logistics companies moving goods across borders, clean energy firms building solar and storage systems, and B2B platforms serving supply chains are pulling capital that once defaulted to payments and lending startups.
The reasons are structural.
Fintech's early wins, mobile payments, digital lending, neobanking, have matured. Many of the largest fintech rounds now go to companies that are already scaled. Investors looking for earlier-stage risk-adjusted returns are finding them in sectors where the gap between demand and supply is still wide.
For the local ecosystem, the comparison is stark. Ghana's startups raised an estimated $56 million across all of 2025.
The continent did ten times that in two months this year, and the capital is increasingly flowing to sectors where Ghanaian companies have limited presence.
Clean energy and B2B infrastructure are where the growth capital is concentrating. Founders building in those verticals on the continent are raising rounds that would have been unthinkable three years ago. Founders still pitching fintech-only models face a more crowded and sceptical investor base.
The question for the rest of Q1: whether the logistics and energy surge holds as March numbers come in, or whether fintech reclaims the lead with a single large round.
