Africa’s IPO Pipeline 2026–2027: Which Startups Are Signalling for a Listing — and Where?

By Business Reporter, BETAR.africa | 12 March 2026

The Breadfast $50 million Pre-Series C, closed in Q1 2026 with Mubadala, IFC, SBI Investment, and EBRD on the cap table, was not just the largest pure equity round in Africa so far this year. It was an institutional signal — the kind of investor coalition that assembles ahead of a public market event, not another private round. Breadfast may not be first to ring the bell. But it sits inside a small, increasingly visible cohort of African-founded companies whose investors are no longer whispering about listings.

The question is no longer whether African tech has an IPO class. The question is which companies, on which exchanges, and how the hard structural lessons of Jumia’s 2019 NYSE listing have changed how founders and investors think about timing.

The Candidates

Four companies are most consistently identified by investors and sector analysts as near-term public market candidates.

Moniepoint is Nigeria’s largest business banking platform by transaction volume, with a network of POS agents and SME-focused financial services products that processed over $182 billion in total payments volume in 2024. Its $110 million Series C, led by Development Partners International (DPI) and including Google’s Africa Investment Fund, was structured around Nigeria-first scale — but executives have consistently spoken about a multi-market expansion that positions the company for a potential NGX or international listing in 2026 or 2027. “We are building a business with public market discipline from day one,” Tobi Balogun, Moniepoint’s CEO, said in a published interview with TechCrunch in late 2024. “That means unit economics, not just volume.”

Wave is the Francophone Africa mobile money operator that upended the region’s incumbent telco-owned wallet ecosystem by cutting transaction fees to near-zero and growing through referrals rather than agent cash-out margins. Its $200 million Series A in 2021, backed by Sequoia, Stripe, and Partech, valued the company at $1.7 billion. Wave now operates in Senegal, Côte d’Ivoire, Mali, Burkina Faso, Uganda, and Tanzania. Investors close to the company have publicly noted Wave’s metrics — low CAC, high retention, expanding ARPU — as consistent with a company building toward a NASDAQ or NYSE listing, though no timeline has been confirmed.

Onafriq (formerly MFS Africa) occupies a different tier: not a consumer-facing brand but the payment infrastructure layer connecting 400 million mobile wallets across 40 African countries. CEO Dare Okoudjou has described Onafriq as “the rails other companies ride,” a positioning that carries a different valuation logic — closer to payment infrastructure businesses like Nuvei or Flywire than to consumer fintech. The company’s $100 million Series C, completed in 2022 with backing from Helios Investment Partners and Adaverse, positioned it for deeper geographic expansion. A London listing, where institutional appetite for African infrastructure plays is stronger than in New York, would be consistent with its business model.

Breadfast completes the picture at the consumer commerce end. The Cairo quick commerce operator’s Pre-Series C cap table — spanning four geographies, two multilaterals, and YC — is consistent with the pre-IPO institutional choreography. Breadfast Pay, its embedded finance product operating under a Central Bank of Egypt licence, extends the monetisation logic well beyond delivery.

The Exchange Question

Where these companies choose to list will matter as much as the timing.

The Nigerian Exchange Group (NGX) has been explicit about its ambitions to attract tech listings. NGX CEO Temi Popoola has said publicly that the exchange is actively engaging with high-growth technology companies to create a listing pathway that accommodates pre-profitability growth businesses — a structural gap that has historically pushed Nigerian founders toward London or New York. Moniepoint, as a Nigeria-first business with a predominantly naira-denominated revenue base, is the natural candidate for an NGX debut.

The Johannesburg Stock Exchange (JSE) remains the most liquid African public market, with over R18 trillion in listed equity and a functioning institutional investor base. For South African companies or pan-African businesses with significant Southern African operations, the JSE remains the default. But for West and East African businesses, the JSE’s geographic friction — legal, governance, and investor relations costs — is a deterrent.

London, specifically AIM or the Main Market, has historically attracted African natural resources companies but has a weaker track record with tech. That said, Onafriq’s infrastructure positioning, combined with London’s depth of fintech institutional coverage, makes the LSE a credible option.

New York — NASDAQ or NYSE — carries the highest visibility and the deepest pool of institutional capital, but also the highest compliance costs and the most demanding investor expectations around profitability trajectory. Post-Jumia, the bar has moved.

The Jumia Lesson

Jumia’s 2019 NYSE listing at $14.50 per share — and its subsequent collapse to below $3 by 2022 — is the reference point every African founder and investor now prices against. The lesson is not that African internet businesses cannot list. It is that listing on a narrative (“Africa’s Amazon”) rather than on financials extracts a credibility cost that takes years to recover.

Jumia listed on GMV growth while burning cash across 14 markets. It had no clear path to profitability in any single market, let alone across the continent. Investors who paid for the continent-of-opportunity story found themselves holding a restructuring story instead. Jumia survived, but only after exiting multiple markets, cutting headcount aggressively, and reorienting toward a smaller, more profitable core.

The companies now approaching IPO readiness have absorbed that lesson at the product level. Moniepoint’s SME-first model is built on transaction fees with defined unit economics. Wave’s margin is thin by design — network effects, not take rate — but the model is financially legible. Onafriq charges infrastructure access fees. Breadfast’s private label penetration gives it margin protection that a pure marketplace never had.

“The Jumia lesson is that African investors are sophisticated now,” said Adesuwa Okunbo Rhodes, founder of Aruwa Capital, in a 2025 interview with AVCA’s annual publication. “The companies that will list successfully in 2026 or 2027 will not be pitching the Africa opportunity. They will be pitching their own numbers.”

The Structural Barriers Remain

Optimism about IPO readiness should not obscure the structural barriers that remain real.

FX volatility is the most persistent. Nigeria’s naira and Egypt’s pound have both experienced significant devaluation pressure in recent years. A company reporting in naira that seeks a USD-denominated listing faces a valuation translation problem that can erode the listing case even when underlying business metrics are strong.

Institutional investor depth on African exchanges remains thin. The NGX and JSE cannot absorb large-cap tech listings without significant retail participation or foreign institutional inflows — both of which are cyclical and not guaranteed.

Analyst coverage is sparse. For a company to list credibly on any exchange, it needs sell-side coverage. London and New York have limited coverage capacity for African businesses outside mining and energy. This is changing — Rand Merchant Bank, Stanbic, and Absa CIB are building equity research capabilities — but it is not yet at the depth required to sustain a multi-billion-dollar listed entity.

The infrastructure is being built. The companies are maturing. The investors are positioned. Africa’s IPO window is not open yet — but the next twelve months will determine who is standing at the door when it is.

BETAR.africa tracks African tech funding in its quarterly African Tech Funding Tracker. All funding figures from company announcements and AVCA data. No companies cited in this report have officially confirmed IPO plans or timelines.