On January 31, employees at KOKO Networks received a text message telling them not to report to work the next day. Within hours, more than 3,000 automated bioethanol dispensers across Nairobi and other Kenyan cities went dark. A company that had spent a decade building what looked like public infrastructure for clean cooking laid off its entire 700-person workforce in a single afternoon, and roughly 1.5 million households lost access to the fuel that had replaced charcoal and kerosene in their kitchens.
KOKO was not a fragile pre-seed experiment. It was one of the largest venture-backed climate companies on the continent, and its collapse set the tone for a year in which Africa’s startup ecosystem has been telling two contradictory stories at once. Funding is technically up. African startups raised $705 million across 59 deals in the first quarter of 2026, a 26.5% jump year-on-year, according to Startup Graveyard Africa’s Q1 report, a figure that lines up with TechMoonshot’s own tracking of the continent’s 2026 funding picture. Yet the companies dying this year are not the anonymous seed-stage failures that used to dominate these lists. They are recognisable names — category leaders, regulatory pioneers, businesses that had already survived the 2022-2023 funding winter once.
TechMoonshot has been tracking the collapses since January, and the pattern that emerges is less about startups running out of money and more about startups running into governments, courts and each other. Kenya, Nigeria, Ghana and South Africa have each produced a marquee 2026 casualty. Egypt, Morocco and Senegal have so far avoided a headline shutdown, but not for reasons that should reassure anyone.
Here is every entry in the graveyard so far:
- KOKO Networks (Kenya) — Shut down January 31 after Kenya’s government denied a carbon-credit Letter of Authorisation; 700 laid off; placed under PwC administration February 1; assets, including its Sanand, India stove factory, up for sale since July.
- Brass (Nigeria) — Ending independent operations, migrating customers to Paystack Microfinance Bank by July 31, two years after a 2024 Paystack-led rescue failed to fully resolve a 2023 withdrawal crisis.
- Gigbanc (Nigeria) — Announced its own wind-down in 2026, citing a fundraising environment that has stayed tough for fintechs outside the top tier.
- Chimoney (Nigeria/Canada) — Ceased all transactions on April 30 after raising under $1 million across four years, too thin to sustain a venture-scale, multi-jurisdiction payments business; refunds stayed open through August 31.
- FoodCourt (Nigeria) — The Y Combinator-backed cloud kitchen paused operations across its Lagos and Abuja branches in April after unpaid salaries triggered a kitchen-staff strike and mounting vendor debt.
- Zeepay (Ghana) — Lost its Dedicated Electronic Money Issuer licence on July 14 after the Bank of Ghana said it failed to fully back customer wallet balances; separately facing a $1.223 million creditor winding-up petition.
- Livestock Wealth (South Africa) — Placed into final liquidation by the Gauteng High Court in June after a failed business-rescue bid, following a two-year FSCA licensing investigation.
- Egypt — No marquee 2026 shutdown, but the Financial Regulatory Authority froze all new fintech and consumer-finance licence applications for a year starting February, chilling the pipeline behind incumbents like MNT-Halan and valU.
- Morocco and Senegal — No headline 2026 casualty; both ecosystems remain earlier in their funding cycles, with state-backed pushes still building the density that produces failures at scale.
Below is the full story behind each one, and the accountability question each collapse leaves behind.
Kenya: KOKO Networks and the Carbon-Credit Standoff
Kenya’s loss was the most abrupt and the most avoidable. KOKO’s business model depended on selling carbon credits generated when low-income households switched from charcoal to bioethanol, using that revenue to subsidise fuel prices below what the raw economics would otherwise allow. The model worked as long as the company could sell those credits internationally. In mid-2026, Kenya’s Climate Change (Carbon Markets) Regulations required a Letter of Authorisation from the government before any company could do so. KOKO applied. The government said no.
Trade Cabinet Secretary Lee Kinyanjui later said KOKO had sought to claim Kenya’s entire carbon credit allocation in the compliance carbon markets, a justification that satisfied few of the people who lost their jobs or their fuel access. A board member told TechCabal the decision followed two days of frantic meetings at KOKO’s Nairobi offices before executives concluded the company was facing bankruptcy without that authorisation. PricewaterhouseCoopers was appointed administrator on February 1 under Kenya’s Insolvency Act, and by July, administrators were shopping the company’s patents, its bioethanol stove factory in Sanand, India, and its fuel distribution network to buyers willing to put up more than $15 million.
The uncomfortable question KOKO leaves for Kenya’s policymakers is whether the country’s climate-tech ambitions can survive a regulatory apparatus that can unilaterally cut off a company’s core revenue stream with no transition period. Kenya wants to be a hub for carbon-market innovation. It also just watched one of its flagship examples liquidate in the space of a weekend.
Nigeria: Brass Gets Absorbed, and the Quieter Casualties Pile Up
Nigeria’s biggest 2026 story is not a shutdown in the traditional sense, but it might be more revealing. Brass, the business-banking startup founded in 2020 by Sola Akindolu and Emmanuel Okeke, announced in June that it would cease operating as an independent company and migrate its remaining customers to Paystack Microfinance Bank by July 31. The announcement closed a saga that began in late 2023, when business owners started reporting that withdrawals from their Brass accounts were stuck for days at a time. By May 2024, a consortium led by Paystack — alongside PiggyVest, Ventures Platform and P1 Ventures — had already stepped in to rescue the company rather than let a deposit-taking fintech collapse outright and rattle confidence in the wider sector.
Nigeria has been here before. TechMoonshot reported on Thepeer’s own regulatory-driven shutdown in 2024, when a fintech that had processed millions in interoperable wallet transfers wound down rather than fight an unworkable compliance landscape. That rescue bought Brass two more years. It did not fix the underlying problem. Brass’s proprietary consumer banking apps will cease to exist, and its remaining small-business balances now sit inside a traditional microfinance structure owned by a much larger corporate parent. Around the same time, Gigbanc, a smaller Nigerian fintech offering global bank accounts, announced its own wind-down, citing a fundraising environment that has become steadily less forgiving even as the venture-debt market has grown more generous elsewhere on the continent.
Two other 2026 Nigerian exits got far less attention than Brass, but they illustrate the same pressure from a different angle. Chimoney, a Nigerian-Canadian cross-border payments startup founded by Uchi Uchibeke in 2022, stopped processing transactions on April 30 after raising less than $1 million across four years of operation. Uchibeke was blunt about the cause in a public post-mortem: the company had tried to run a venture-scale, multi-jurisdiction payments business on bootstrap-level capital, and when revenue stayed flat with no path to more funding, he chose to wind down while the company could still refund every client dollar rather than limp toward a messier collapse. Chimoney told investors of its plans in February and gave customers until August 31 to reclaim their balances.
FoodCourt, the Y Combinator-backed Nigerian cloud kitchen startup, tells a different version of the same story. TechMoonshot reported in July on the cracks exposed when FoodCourt paused operations across its Lekki, Obanikoro and Abuja locations after kitchen staff went on strike over unpaid wages. The company had reported $4.3 million in annual recurring revenue and profitability as recently as 2024, expanding into Abuja on the strength of that momentum. By March 2026, working-capital pressure, rising food and logistics costs, and organisational strain had eroded that position badly enough that the app stopped taking orders altogether. Founder Henry Nneji says the company intends to relaunch after restructuring, but the pause itself is a reminder that even a startup with real revenue and a Y Combinator badge can run out of runway fast in Nigeria’s food-tech market, where fellow YC company Chowdeck was posting record delivery volumes in the very same month.
Read together, Brass, Gigbanc, Chimoney and FoodCourt describe a Nigerian startup landscape where the funding winter never entirely ended for anyone outside the top tier. TechMoonshot has previously documented the consolidation wave now reshaping the ecosystem, in which three or four dominant platforms are absorbing smaller competitors’ licences, infrastructure and customer bases rather than letting them fail outright. Brass’s ending looks less like a startup death and more like a controlled demolition, engineered specifically to avoid the kind of contagion that a Nigerian neobank collapse would otherwise trigger. Chimoney and FoodCourt got no such rescue. Whether that gap comes down to sector, scale or simply who a founder knows is a question Nigeria’s ecosystem has not answered honestly yet.
Ghana: Zeepay Loses Its Licence
Ghana’s casualty carries a sharper regulatory edge. On July 14, the Bank of Ghana revoked Zeepay’s Dedicated Electronic Money Issuer licence, the authorisation the company had held since 2020 to operate as the country’s first fintech electronic money issuer. The central bank said Zeepay had repeatedly failed to hold enough cash to back the electronic money circulating in customer wallets, a prudential requirement that exists specifically so people can withdraw their funds on demand without triggering a run. Regulators say they directed Zeepay to correct the shortfall and wind down its electronic money operations voluntarily. The company did not comply, according to the central bank, which concluded that letting Zeepay continue operating risked undermining confidence in Ghana’s entire digital payments system.
The timing compounds the damage. Zeepay is simultaneously facing a court petition from a creditor seeking to wind up the company over an alleged unpaid debt of $1.223 million, and enforcement proceedings have already resulted in the seizure of assets linked to founder and CEO Andrew Takyi-Appiah. The Bank of Ghana insists the licence revocation is a separate matter from the litigation, but few observers in Accra’s fintech community are treating the two as coincidental. Zeepay had been one of the country’s most recognisable remittance brands, processing cross-border transfers into mobile money wallets across Africa and the Caribbean. Its unravelling is now functioning as a live stress test of how much protection Ghana’s payment systems law actually offers ordinary wallet holders when a licensed operator’s books do not add up.
South Africa: Livestock Wealth’s Court-Ordered Collapse
South Africa’s entry into the graveyard came from a sector few people were watching closely: agricultural crowdfunding. Livestock Wealth, the Johannesburg-based platform that let retail investors buy stakes in cattle, macadamia trees and other farm assets since 2015, was placed into final liquidation by the Gauteng High Court in June. Acting Judge JF Pretorius dismissed founder Ntuthuko Shezi’s business rescue application, ruling the company both commercially and factually insolvent and describing the proposed rescue plan as amounting to little more than speculation.
The Financial Sector Conduct Authority had investigated Livestock Wealth for two years over whether it held the licences required to operate legally, ultimately clearing it of unlawful activity on the technical grounds that agricultural assets fall outside the regulator’s definition of financial products. That finding did nothing to help the retail investors and stokvels who say they were promised repayments that never arrived; one creditor claims it is still owed nearly ZAR 140,000 despite written assurances. Livestock Wealth’s failure now sits alongside a string of collapsed agri-crowdfunding platforms across the continent, and it exposes a genuine regulatory gap: an entire asset class marketed to ordinary savers as an investment product, operating in a category that no single South African regulator is clearly responsible for policing. It is also not South Africa’s only 2026 governance scandal — TechMoonshot covered 54 Collective’s court-ordered liquidation over allegations it misused $42 million in Mastercard Foundation grant money, a case that has already made international funders warier of large-scale South African venture bets.
Egypt, Morocco and Senegal: The Quiet Casualties
The countries without a headline 2026 casualty tell their own story, and it is not entirely a happy one. Egypt has avoided a marquee shutdown so far, but its Financial Regulatory Authority froze all new consumer-finance and fintech licence applications for a full year in February, a decision the regulator says is meant to preserve stability after total financing under its supervision surged past $22 billion. That freeze protects incumbents like MNT-Halan and valU while making it considerably harder for the next wave of Egyptian fintech founders to get off the ground at all — a graveyard of companies that never got the chance to fail visibly because they were never licensed to launch.
Morocco and Senegal, meanwhile, remain too early in their funding cycles to have produced a shutdown at KOKO or Brass’s scale. Morocco’s $142 million state-backed startup push and Senegal’s newly operational Startup Act are still building the ecosystem density that produces both spectacular successes and spectacular failures. Absence of casualties in smaller markets is not evidence of resilience. It is evidence that there is not yet enough at stake to lose.
The Pattern Underneath the Graveyard
What connects Nairobi, Lagos, Accra and Johannesburg this year is not a shortage of capital. It is a shortage of trust between founders, regulators and the customers whose money sat inside these platforms. Africa’s tech ecosystem spent 2022 through 2025 absorbing the lesson that venture-backed growth without a path to profitability eventually runs out of runway. The 2026 graveyard is teaching a harder lesson: that surviving the funding winter does not protect a company from a government agency that changes the rules overnight, a court that finally runs out of patience, or a bigger competitor that would rather absorb your licence than watch you collapse in public. Whichever startup becomes the next entry, the cause of death is unlikely to be a simple empty bank account.
