Why Kinnevik Left African Tech — And How New Swedish VCs Are Rewriting the Playbook

In the early 2010s, one of Sweden's biggest investment firms arrived in Africa with serious money and a bold plan: build the digital businesses that would define the continent's future.

A few years later, it was gone — walking away from most of its investments at a heavy loss.

The story of Kinnevik's exit from Africa is often told as a warning about investing in the continent. But that misses the real lesson. Kinnevik didn't leave because Africa failed. It left because the way it invested was wrong for the market it was entering. And a new generation of Swedish investors has now arrived, armed with the lessons Kinnevik learned the hard way.

Why Kinnevik came to Africa in the first place

To understand this story, you have to go back to 2012. The global economy was still recovering from the 2008 financial crisis. European tech markets felt crowded and expensive. Africa — especially Nigeria — looked like the next big opportunity.

Kinnevik's reasoning made sense on paper. Nigeria had a fast-growing population, rising smartphone adoption, and millions of people without bank accounts. The plan was to take the business models that had worked in the West such as e-commerce marketplaces, discount platforms, online classifieds, and build them in Lagos.

Working through German startup incubator Rocket Internet, Kinnevik put tens of millions of dollars into Nigerian startups. It backed Konga, a Nigerian e-commerce company aiming to be the Amazon of West Africa. It invested in iROKOtv, a streaming platform for Nollywood content. It funded DealDey, a discount and voucher platform. And through its subsidiary Saltside Technologies, it fully bankrolled Efritin, an online classifieds site.

In Kinnevik's eyes, this was not a speculative bet. It was a land grab for the digital future of West Africa.

What actually happened

The reality that followed was far harder than the pitch.

User numbers looked good on paper. But beneath the surface, the unit economics — basically, whether each transaction actually made money — were fundamentally broken.

The problem was infrastructure. Building an internet business in Nigeria in 2012 meant building physical infrastructure that barely existed. Konga, for example, did not just need software engineers. It had to build its own warehouses, run its own delivery fleet (called KExpress), and deal with constant power outages. What was supposed to be a lean digital business became an expensive, asset-heavy operation that cost enormous amounts of money to run.

And even when these companies grew their revenues, a second problem emerged. Nigeria's population was large, but the number of people with enough disposable income to shop online regularly was much smaller than the headline numbers suggested.

Then came the final blow. A global crash in commodity prices in the mid-2010s hit Nigeria hard. Oil revenues fell sharply, and the Nigerian naira lost significant value against the dollar. Even when Konga and its peers grew their local revenues, those revenues were worth far less when converted back into dollars or Swedish krona.

The exits

By 2016, Kinnevik had seen enough. A leadership change in Stockholm brought a new strategic direction: focus entirely on European healthcare, software, and climate tech. Africa was out.

What followed was a swift liquidation of its African portfolio:

• In 2017, Saltside Technologies shut down Efritin Nigeria entirely, laying off its staff after concluding the platform could not become profitable under the conditions it was operating in.

• In 2018, in a move that shocked the African tech industry, Kinnevik and its co-investor Naspers sold their stake in Konga to Nigerian conglomerate Zinox Group. By the time of the sale, Kinnevik had invested a total of $36.1 million in Konga over five years — but had already written down the value of that investment to just $16 million in 2017.

Some sources, including Nairametrics citing sources at Nigeria's Securities and Exchange Commission, reported that the actual sale price paid by Zinox may have been as low as a nominal fee, making it one of the most costly exits in African tech history. Naspers, for its part, confirmed that "despite various restructuring initiatives, the business has not reached the scale and level of profitability required to fund itself as it currently stands." (Quartz Africa, 2018)

• Between 2019 and 2021, Kinnevik quietly wrote down or exited its remaining African stakes, including micro-insurance provider BIMA and credit provider Bayport.

Kinnevik did not leave because it was impatient. It left because keeping these businesses alive long enough to eventually profit would have required hundreds of millions more in capital; money it was not willing to commit.

The gap Kinnevik left behind

When a firm that size exits a market, the fear is that other investors follow. That did not happen. Instead, a new generation of Swedish and European investors moved in, arriving with a fundamentally different approach.

The most notable example is Norrsken22, co-founded by Niklas Adalberth, the co-founder of Swedish fintech giant Klarna and founder of the Norrsken Foundation. Norrsken22 raised a $205 million fund — its first African Technology Growth Fund — explicitly targeting African tech, closing above its original $200 million target in November 2023. (TechCrunch, November 2023)

The fund's general partners are based locally across Nigeria, South Africa, Kenya, and Ghana; not in Stockholm. Its backers include the International Finance Corporation, British International Investment, and the U.S. International Development Finance Corporation, alongside over 30 unicorn founders from around the world, including Flutterwave's Olugbenga Agboola and Skype co-founder Niklas Zennström.

Other investors, including VNV Global and a range of development finance institutions, also stepped up to fill the space Kinnevik had vacated.

What the new investors are doing differently

The new wave of Swedish capital is not making the same mistakes. Three things stand out:

• They have people on the ground, not just capital from Stockholm. Kinnevik managed its African portfolio primarily from Sweden. Norrsken22's general partners are based locally in the cities where their portfolio companies operate.

As the fund's managing partner Natalie Kolbe put it: "Having three general partners in the beacon economies of sub-Saharan Africa — Nigeria, Kenya and South Africa — we were able to provide the companies with people on the ground and networks on the ground, and we also understand the nuances of growth and opportunity in each of our markets."

• They are backing infrastructure and B2B businesses, not consumer e-commerce. Kinnevik tried to build consumer-facing platforms before the logistics, payments, and power infrastructure existed to support them. The new wave targets businesses that improve that infrastructure — fintech platforms, supply chain tools, B2B marketplaces — rather than businesses that depend on infrastructure that has not been built yet.

• They care about unit economics from day one. The era of burning investor money to grow user numbers, regardless of whether those users were profitable, is over. The new playbook prioritizes businesses that make money on each transaction from an early stage, rather than assuming profitability will come later at scale.

That shift is visible in the data. African tech startups raised $4.1 billion in combined equity and debt financing in 2025 — a 25% year-on-year increase, according to Partech Africa's 2025 Africa Tech Venture Capital Report. (Partech Africa, January 2026)

But perhaps more telling than the total is how the money is structured. Venture debt — loans to startups rather than equity — reached a record $1.64 billion in 2025, a 63% jump from the year before, according to the same Partech report. That kind of financing gives startups predictable cash without diluting founders, and it signals that investors are looking for businesses with real, recurring revenue rather than growth stories built on equity burn.

As Tidjane Dème, General Partner at Partech Africa, put it: "This year's rebound highlights the resilience of African founders and the growing sophistication of capital markets across the continent."

The deal activity bears it out

Capital is also concentrating where it makes the most sense. Rather than betting on pan-African experiments the way Kinnevik did, today's investors are focusing on markets with more mature infrastructure. Kenya, South Africa, Egypt, and Nigeria captured 72% of all African tech deal activity in 2025, according to Partech Africa's report. Nigeria alone attracted $572 million, proof that institutional appetite for West African innovation never disappeared; it just became more selective.

What this story actually means

Kinnevik's exit from Africa is not a cautionary tale about the continent. It is a cautionary tale about investing in a market you do not fully understand, with a business model that does not fit the conditions on the ground.

The companies Kinnevik backed proved something important: there was real appetite for digital products in Africa, and real talent to build them. What did not exist yet was the infrastructure to support the specific models Kinnevik tried to deploy, or the patience and local knowledge to adapt those models until the infrastructure caught up.

The new wave of Swedish investors has taken that lesson seriously. They came later, came smaller, and came with people embedded in the cities they were betting on. And so far, the results suggest that the African tech story was never the problem. The entry strategy was.

---

Track funding rounds, investor activity, and major market moves like this across African tech at Klari — free, searchable, with no login required