Africa’s six-year tech IPO drought ended dramatically in November as South African fintech Optasia and Moroccan payments firm Cash Plus together raised $427 million in back-to-back listings on the Johannesburg and Casablanca stock exchanges, marking the continent’s first homegrown tech debuts since 2019.
South African fintech lender Optasia made its debut on the Johannesburg Stock Exchange on November 4, pricing shares that gave the company a market capitalization of $1.4 billion and raising $345 million in primary capital, according to the latest report by Africa: The Big Deal.
Three weeks later, on November 25, Moroccan payments group Cash Plus rang the bell at the Casablanca Stock Exchange, pulling in $82.5 million at a $550 million valuation.
The twin listings mark the first time African technology companies have gone public on the continent since Jumia and Fawry listed in 2019, breaking a drought that had stretched through the pandemic, the 2022 funding winter, and the subsequent global risk-off environment.
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Optasia, which provides AI-driven credit scoring and lending-as-a-service to telecoms and financial institutions across emerging markets, saw its shares jump as much as 28 percent on the opening day before settling 19 percent above the IPO price.
Cash Plus, Morocco’s largest independent money-transfer and bill-payment network, closed its first session up 15 percent.
The timing is notable. Both companies chose to list at a moment when African private funding, while recovering, remains well below the 2021–2022 peak.
According to data compiled by Africa: The Big Deal, the continent’s startups raised $162 million in November outside of these IPOs, a respectable but hardly spectacular figure.
The public markets, by contrast, delivered more than twice that amount in a single month to just for these two names.
Investors say the listings could open the floodgates. At least four other African unicorns, including Nigerian payments giant Flutterwave and South African insurtech Pineapple, have recently restarted or accelerated dual-track processes that combine late-stage private rounds with preparations for public debuts in 2026 or 2027.
For now, Johannesburg and Casablanca have reclaimed center stage. The JSE’s main board has not seen a tech listing of Optasia’s size since Naspers spun out Prosus in 2019, while the Casablanca bourse has been pushing aggressively to attract growth companies with tax incentives and streamlined requirements for tech issuers.
