One company alone has raised more in 2026 than the other nine startups on this list combined. That imbalance says almost everything about where climate money is actually going on the continent this year: not evenly across a broad startup ecosystem, but concentrated into a small number of infrastructure-heavy operators with hard assets, predictable cash flows, and a debt-friendly balance sheet. Climate tech has overtaken fintech as the sector investors trust most in Africa, and the ten deals below, ranked by disclosed capital raised so far this year, show exactly which companies are capturing that shift and which financing structures are winning.
Electric Mobility’s Big Bet
1. Spiro — roughly $320 million across four rounds
No African climate tech company is close to Spiro’s 2026. The electric motorcycle and battery-swapping operator opened the year with a $57 million debt facility from Afreximbank, Nithio, and the Africa Go Green Fund in February, then closed a $215 million equity round in June backed by Impact Fund Denmark and Equitane, before topping it off with a further $55 million from Shanghai-based NewTrails Capital just three weeks later. Spiro now runs more than 100,000 electric motorcycles and 2,500 battery-swap stations across seven countries, and its disclosed lifetime funding has climbed past half a billion dollars, making it comfortably the best-funded electric mobility company on the continent.
2. Zeno — $25 million
Kenya and Uganda-based Zeno closed a $25 million Series A in March, split between $20.5 million in equity led by Congruent Ventures and $4.5 million in debt from Camber Road and Trifecta Capital. The round is notable less for its size than its timing: African hardware startups have struggled to raise growth capital this year, and Zeno’s raise was flagged as an outlier in an otherwise dry funding environment for early-stage e-mobility players. The company builds its own Emara electric motorbike and an app-controlled battery-swap network rather than importing hardware, and says riders cut running costs roughly in half by switching from petrol.
The Solar Financiers Scaling Commercial and Industrial Power
3. CrossBoundary Energy — $40 million
CrossBoundary Energy took $40 million from Inspired Evolution in April to keep building out solar for commercial and industrial clients across the continent, adding to a portfolio that already includes long-term power agreements with companies like Unilever, Diageo, and AB InBev. The model sidesteps the upfront capital problem that keeps most African businesses on diesel: CrossBoundary owns and finances the solar assets itself, then sells the power back to clients through long-term contracts, which is why the company has been able to raise repeatedly against the same underlying pipeline of projects.
4. Starsight Energy — $15 million
Starsight Energy Africa Group secured $15 million in mezzanine debt from British International Investment in March, aimed squarely at Nigeria, where the company estimates businesses generate up to 40 gigawatts of power from diesel and petrol generators rather than the grid. Most of the funding will go toward new commercial and industrial solar projects in Nigeria, with the remainder supporting Starsight’s smaller Ghana operation. The same energy-poverty dynamic driving Starsight’s Nigerian pipeline has become the default investment thesis across the sector this year: sell reliable power to businesses that already pay far more for diesel.
5. GreenCo — $10 million
Zambia-based Africa GreenCo picked up its first private institutional investor in May, when Sanlam Alternative Investments bought a 10% equity stake for $10 million. GreenCo does not generate power itself; it acts as an intermediary that buys electricity from renewable projects across the Southern African Power Pool and resells it to businesses and utilities, absorbing the credit risk that has historically made African renewable projects hard to finance. Sanlam’s entry matters structurally more than the dollar figure suggests, since GreenCo had relied almost entirely on development finance institutions until now.
6. Sawa Energy — $10 million
Kampala-based Sawa Energy secured a $10 million debt facility from Oikocredit and the Global Climate Partnership Fund in April to install 35 megawatts of solar across 250 commercial and industrial sites in East Africa over the next three years. Like CrossBoundary and Starsight, Sawa builds, owns, and operates the solar systems itself rather than selling equipment, letting Ugandan and Rwandan businesses switch to solar without any upfront cost.
The Small Bets Building the Next Layer
7. Zimi Charge — $2.6 million
South Africa’s Zimi Charge raised $2.6 million from the Development Bank of Southern Africa and Keyo Ventures this year to expand EV charging infrastructure, a smaller but strategically placed bet on the electric vehicle adoption curve that Zeno and Spiro are building around motorcycles further north.
8. Koolboks — $1.5 million
Nigerian startup Koolboks picked up $1.5 million through Cascador’s catalytic funding programme in June for its solar-powered refrigeration units, targeting small food vendors and households in areas where grid power is too unreliable to trust with perishable stock.
9. Powerstove — $1.3 million
Also backed by Cascador in June, Powerstove raised $1.3 million to scale its IoT-enabled clean cookstoves, a category that sits adjacent to the carbon-credit-funded clean cooking model that collapsed spectacularly for KOKO Networks earlier this year, though Powerstove’s model does not appear to depend on credit sales in the same way.
10. Eja-Ice — $1 million
Nigerian startup Eja-Ice closed $1 million from All On for off-grid solar cold-chain infrastructure, aimed at fish and produce sellers who currently lose a significant share of stock to spoilage without reliable refrigeration.
What the List Actually Shows
Line the ten up and a pattern jumps out immediately: eight of the ten are financing solar or electric mobility assets directly, not building software or marketplaces around them. Debt and mezzanine structures appear in at least six of the ten deals, a sign that lenders now trust these companies’ cash flows enough to underwrite them the way they would underwrite any infrastructure asset. That is a healthier signal than a pure equity boom would be, but it also means access to capital increasingly depends on having an asset base large enough to borrow against, which favours later-stage operators like Spiro and CrossBoundary Energy over first-time founders trying to get a pilot off the ground. The startups at the bottom of this list, still raising six and seven-figure equity and grant rounds, are the ones worth watching to see whether that gap closes or widens through the rest of the year.
