The Two Ghost Numbers Holding Up Every African Tech Valuation
Public SaaS comps reset 60% since 2021. African Series B pricing didn’t. The unwind is starting
The African tech IPO drought ended in November 2025. The drought was not the problem.
On 4 November, Optasia rang the bell at the Johannesburg Stock Exchange. The AI-driven credit-scoring fintech raised $345 million at a $1.4 billion market cap, with shares jumping 28% intraday before settling 19% above issue. Three weeks later, Cash Plus listed on the Casablanca Stock Exchange — $82.5 million raised at a $550 million valuation, first-day pop of 15%. Together, $427 million in primary capital across two African exchanges in a single month. The first homegrown tech IPOs on the continent since Jumia and Fawry in 2019.
The consensus read across the African VC market has been near-unanimous. Africa: The Big Deal called it the end of the drought. BusinessDay framed it as the IPO window opening. Trade press and investor newsletters have treated November as the inflection that puts African tech listings back on the table.
The PE Exit That Looked Like a Tech IPO
Both companies were already exit-ready before they listed. Optasia (founded 2012, rebranded from Channel VAS, Ethos Capital-backed, headquartered in Dubai, operating across 38 countries) reported $117 million in H1 2025 revenue and $54 million in H1 EBITDA. At its $1.4 billion market cap, the listing priced at roughly 6x revenue and 13x EBITDA on annualized H1 numbers. Those are payment-processor multiples. Not venture tech multiples. Optasia is a 13-year-old PE-backed multi-region fintech doing a PE exit on a public market.
Cash Plus, sitting on Mediterrania Capital Partners’ books, used the listing to deliver liquidity to existing shareholders alongside primary growth capital. Cell C also listed on the JSE in November and gets bundled into most “African tech IPO recovery” counts; Cell C is a distressed mobile operator emerging from multiple debt restructurings, structurally unrelated to anything happening in African tech.
Neither Optasia nor Cash Plus needed the public market. The public market was a preferred path for assets that already had multiple options. The rest of the African private capital stack prices off two reference points that have either compressed dramatically or never reliably existed.
Both reference points are foreign. Both are ghosts.
Ghost Number One: The Comp Set
When an African Series B founder builds a pricing case for a round, the comp deck almost always includes a basket of US and EU public SaaS multiples. The implicit logic flows downward from a public anchor: public software valuations set the global ceiling, private deals trade at a discount, and African deals trade at a further discount.
The anchor moved. Then it moved again.
Public SaaS EV/Revenue multiples peaked at roughly 18.6x in late 2021. By the end of 2025, the public SaaS index sat at 6-7x. As of March 2026, the median had dropped further to approximately 5.5x — a 21% compression in a single quarter, the sharpest move since the 2022 rate-hike correction. The five-year drawdown from peak is now north of 70%.
Median private SaaS M&A multiples followed the same path with a lag, peaking around 6.4x in 2021, dropping to 2.9x in 2024 (SaaS Capital Index), and rebounding to a 3.8-5.3x range in Q1 2026 across multiple datasets. Aventis Advisors flagged something almost no one in the SaaS coverage universe used to say: EV/EBITDA is now displacing EV/Revenue as the primary metric, with the SaaS index trading at roughly 26.6x EBITDA — a profitability discipline that did not apply when revenue multiples ruled.
Now run the math on a typical African Series C deck being structured right now. Take a company at $30 million in annual revenue. Priced against a 2022-vintage public SaaS comp basket of 9x revenue, with a 25% private discount and a 15% Africa discount, the round lands at $172 million post-money. The same company priced against the current public median of 5.5x, with a defensible 30% private discount (Windsor Drake’s mid-point for the lower middle market range) and the same 15% Africa discount, lands at roughly $98 million post-money. The deck is pricing the round at nearly 1.8x the honest number — and that gap widens the further you anchor to 2021-2022 multiples.
Most decks are anchored worse than that. The comp tables built into advisor templates in 2021-2022 are still there. Nobody has refresh incentives — founders prefer the higher number and advisors get paid on round size, while existing investors prefer marks that hold without challenge. The only party with structural interest in the lower number is the new lead, and the new lead is increasingly noticing.
What happens next is straightforward arithmetic. A round priced against ghost comps lands at a post-money the next round cannot defend. The down round arrives, weighted-average anti-dilution adjustments fire, reserved-share refresh kicks in, and the cap table reconstruction work nobody planned for becomes Q3 board agenda.
For GPs, the same compression sits unseen inside portfolio marks. If a 2022 mark was based on a 2021-2022 comp set and has not been refreshed against current public multiples, the reported NAV is mechanically inflated. The DPI/NAV gap that everyone in African VC discusses as an exit problem is partly a marking problem. When realized exits price against current comps and reported marks did not move, the gap widens not because exits got worse but because marks were never rebased.
Ghost Number Two: The Listing Exit
The IPO is conventionally treated as the terminal liquidity event in a venture cap table. The conventional sequence runs from building scale to listing to distribution. The sequence assumes the listing actually delivers liquidity to insiders — that the public market provides float depth, an institutional buyer base, and post-IPO trading conditions that allow early investors to sell down meaningful positions over a reasonable horizon.
For African tech, that sequence has cleared three companies in seven years. Jumia listed on NYSE in 2019. Fawry listed in Cairo in 2019. Swvl went public via SPAC on Nasdaq in 2022 at a $1.5 billion valuation, then delisted to OTC pink sheets after losing more than 95% of its value from peak.
The TLP Advisory 2025 founder survey put concrete numbers on the founder side. 53% of Nigerian tech founders do not understand the NGX listing process. 46% prefer M&A exits. Only 21% would consider an IPO. The currency mismatch alone disqualifies most NGX paths for venture-backed companies — 77% of Nigerian founders raise in dollars and earn in naira, and dollar-denominated investors require dollar-denominated exits. NGX market cap of around $62 billion against NYSE’s $28.3 trillion tells you the float story without further analysis.
The November 2025 listings do not break the historical pattern. They confirm it. AVCA and PwC’s joint study on African PE-backed IPO exits found that listings have tracked below other markets and called for industry dialogue on how to drive activity. November 2025 is consistent with that finding rather than a break from it. Both Optasia and Cash Plus listed because they were already structured as PE-style assets with profitable unit economics, multiple potential buyers, and no acute capital pressure. They could afford the listing process because they did not need it.
Set against that, sponsor-to-sponsor secondary transactions hit a record 26% of African PE exits in 2025 (AVCA). Strategic M&A made up roughly 64% of the rest, with IPOs and other exits accounting for the remaining 10%. Sponsor-to-sponsor at record highs is a market signal: secondary participants are pricing off each other rather than off public market reference, which is rational only when the public market reference is broken or unavailable.
This is also why the LASPA structure mattered when Launch Africa pioneered it earlier this year. A structured secondary purchase mechanism that sets price through bilateral negotiation against fundamental analysis is exactly the workaround you build when the public market validation layer is not delivering. The market is constructing its own reference architecture because the imported one does not work.
What Honest Pricing Looks Like Now
The fix is mechanical.
Comp baskets need to be refreshed quarterly against live public multiples and segmented by business model rather than by geography. African fintech is not a single comp basket. A pure payments processor genuinely should comp closer to StoneCo or PagSeguro at 0.5-2x revenue. A lending fintech should comp against international neobanks. An embedded finance or B2B SaaS play should comp against US/EU SaaS minus discounts, with a Rule of 40 filter applied before any company qualifies as a comp at all.
For exit modelling, the IPO line should come out of most cap table forecasts. The realistic exit set for a Series B African scaleup is strategic M&A to a regional or global acquirer, sponsor-to-sponsor secondary to a later-stage Africa fund, or structured liquidity through instruments like LASPA. The terminal multiple in any forecast should reflect the acquirer’s listing-venue median minus a private discount minus an Africa discount minus an FX risk premium.
For LPs assessing GP marks, the single most informative question is: what comp basket was used in the most recent portfolio mark, and when was it last refreshed? A GP whose answer involves a 2022 template has marks that will reset under pressure. A GP whose answer involves quarterly refresh against current public medians has marks that will hold.
The ghost numbers do not vanish because the market notices them. They reprice through a sequence of down rounds, recapitalisations, quietly written-down marks, and the slow recognition that 2022 reference prices were never real for the African market. The reset is starting now.
The round you raise off honest comps is the round you do not have to defend at the next one. The mark you can defend at LPAC is the mark that does not require an apology in 2027.
Midweek paid piece works through the comp re-anchoring framework with specific baskets for fintech, B2B SaaS, and embedded finance, plus a portfolio mark audit checklist.