00:00Bloomberg is taking a deep dive into Africa's startup culture, and our 2026 list of African
00:05startups to watch spotlights a new wave of companies tackling some of the continent's
00:10most urgent challenges. This year's theme is urgency, with a focus on companies building
00:15solutions where infrastructure gaps and strained systems have left millions underserved.
00:21For a closer look at the innovators that made the cut this year, we're now joined by Bloomberg
00:26managing editor for Africa, that is Arjit Ghosh. Arjit, thank you so much for being here. As I was
00:31mentioning there, this is the second year that Bloomberg is doing the startups to watch list.
00:36Let's just start with the theme, urgency. Give us some context as to how that came about and why you
00:41felt like this was the year for this theme. Thank you, Jennifer, and that's a great question.
00:45So the urgency, as you rightly mentioned, there are so many other challenges on this continent that
00:52companies are trying to solve, especially the startups, and that's what we thought. We will
00:56kind of focus on urgency at this year. If you look at other countries like the U.S., for instance,
01:01the big focus is AI. But here in Africa, companies are really trying to solve everyday
01:08challenges and even trying to scale using, you know, coming into those, solving those challenges,
01:16really. Now, for instance, if you look at Madagascar, we found a company there that has been
01:20looking at ways to find ways to tackle climate change and food production. In Tanzania, there's
01:28another company that is looking at safe ways to get drinking water to millions of people. And they
01:34can really scale, I think. So that's what that's what we thought will be kind of we look at urgency
01:39and we call it urgency for this year's list.
01:41And as you point out, it's startups are focusing on different solutions depending on where you look
01:47in the world. But I think what everyone is has maybe as an overhang for most of the world are
01:52the changes to the investment environment, given the Trump administration, given what we're seeing
01:57in the Middle East. Have you seen that factor into any of the startups that that are on this list,
02:02sort of the funding challenges and maybe the opportunities that they've had?
02:06So we spoke to a couple of founders and one particular founder in Chad. So he told us that
02:12earlier it was Africa growth story that investors were focusing on. But now it's changed to where
02:20is the operational discipline? What's the unit economics looking like? So that seems to have
02:27changed. What we saw last year was that a lot of the startups were depending on African backers.
02:34And that seems to have increased this year from the list that we collated. The other thing that
02:41we kind of noticed was debt financing. Yeah. Right. We saw that a lot of companies were actually going
02:47in for debt financing rather than equity and could be because, you know, companies, given all the risk
02:53that is around this world, they really want to make sure that they get their money back. And that's
02:57why they were looking at debt. And a noticeable change from last year. Correct. Correct. Yes, yes,
03:01yes. Yeah. You'd mentioned some of the startups that are on this list. We, of course, know that
03:06there's quite a few, but what others have stood out to you that people should be paying attention
03:10to? We do have the full list, though, out right now. But what should we maybe talk about?
03:15So, for example, this company from Chad, it is doing telemedicine and they've set up kiosks,
03:20not just apps. They've actually set up kiosks, solar powered kiosks, kiosks that actually people can go
03:26in. And this is the first time a company from Chad has come in. The other exciting bit was that
03:31we
03:32actually saw companies all the way from Ivory Coast to Madagascar. We even have a company from
03:36Somalia, which is which is kind of using weed to come up with biochar and charcoal. So it was very
03:46exciting to see that there are companies from across the continent and not just the three, four major
03:52hubs, really Egypt, South Africa, Kenya, Nigeria. They do have excellent ecosystems, but we really
03:57saw this really spreading out to other parts of the continent.
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