Yassir, an Algerian super app that is currently present in 45 cities across North Africa and West Africa, made global headlines this month when it announced a $150 million series B led by BOND, one of the world's most prolific venture funds. The company said the new capital injection, which is currently the highest single investment ever raised by any North African startup, made it the most valuable startup in North Africa and one of the few on the continent and in the Middle East. This came about eight months after Instadeep, a Tunisian artificial intelligence (AI) startup, secured a $100 million series B funding, making history as the first mega funding ($100 million investment and above) ever raised by a startup from the Maghreb region and Africa’s first mega funding in 2022.
As of November 2022, two out of five African mega investments this year came from the Maghreb region. And as expected, these new record-high metrics are bringing the region under the spotlight. “Yassir has put our ecosystem on the map. Instadeep too,” Ismail Belkhayat, co-founder and CEO of Chari, a Moroccan e-commerce platform digitizing informal retailing in Northern and French-speaking African countries, told Al-Monitor. Chari, founded in 2020, was last valued at $100 million and has made three acquisitions, including Axa Credit, the credit arm of Axa Assurance Maroc, which it bought for $22 million.
