OUR Space, co-founded by Sanelisiwe Njobe from South Africa, received the Best Deep Tech and AI Start-up Award.

Five African start-ups won the first leg of the AfricArena Tour 2024, which automatically secures them a spot to compete at the grand finale, which will take place in Cape Town in December.

During the AfricArena Deep Tech & AI, Enterprise, and Green Economy Summit, held last week in Johannesburg, 14 African tech start-ups engaged in pitch battles to raise funds to accelerate their development and scaling of their solutions.

The five successful start-ups were:

• OUR Space, co-founded by Sanelisiwe Njobe from South Africa, received the Best Deep Tech and AI Start-up Award;

• Kaloola, represented by Eben Mbhele of South Africa, received the Best Green Economy Start-up Award;

• Boardroom from South Africa, co-founded by Serisha Barrat, received the Best Enterprise Start-up Award.

• Empiras Global Academy, co-founded by Gugu and Lulu Ntuli from South Africa, received the Best FemTech Start-up Award.

• Shamba Pride, founded by Samuel Munguti, received the Most Promising Entrepreneur Award.

Each of the winning start-ups received 25,000 AWS Activate Credits.

AfricArena CEO and co-founder Christophe Viarnaud, said: “We are very impressed with the calibre of start-ups that pitched in this Johannesburg edition. Each year, African-led and African-bred tech start-ups continue to generate astonishing results, keeping up with the pace of technology in order to bring much needed innovative solutions to the world.

“Africa is truly emerging as a global leader with its tech and investment ecosystem becoming stronger by the day and we all need to collaborate and innovate together for us to succeed.”

The AfricArena event provided an opportunity for equity funders from across the world to meet in Johannesburg and discuss the continent tech start-up scene. Among the discussion points was highlighting a decrease in investment in African start-ups to $2.4 billion in 2023, but despite this, Africa's economic development is expected to outpace global growth this year.

The summit was co-hosted by African Venture Capital Association (AVCA), AWS Startups, Technology Innovation Agency, Silicon Overdrive, and Methys and held concurrently with the annual AVCA conference and the Venture Capital Summit.