In the first months of 2025, Joovlin, a Nigerian financial technology company created to streamline payments for micro-suppliers, quietly closed its doors. The firm, which had gained early traction with more than 2,000 active resellers and over 6,000 listed products, cited insufficient revenue growth to sustain operations without ongoing investment. In a statement posted on LinkedIn, its founders explained that user numbers had not expanded at the pace needed to achieve profitability. Without fresh capital and with reserves running low, Joovlin could no longer continue.
Joovlin’s story is emblematic of a larger trend shaping Africa’s startup ecosystem. Over the past decade, the continent has witnessed an explosion of entrepreneurial activity and investment interest, with technology ventures emerging in sectors from fintech and education to health and logistics. Yet beneath the excitement lies a sobering reality: approximately 70 per cent of African startups fail within their first five years. This estimate, reported by Disrupt Africa, reflects the structural fragility of a landscape still in transition. Between January 2023 and June 2025 alone, 33 startups across Africa shut down operations, with Nigeria accounting for nearly half.
The reasons extend beyond the oft-cited shortage of capital. While limited access to funding remains a formidable obstacle, underlying operational and strategic weaknesses play an equally decisive role. Many ventures launch with ambitious visions but without clear alignment between product design and local market realities. Organisational structures are frequently underdeveloped, expansion strategies premature, and business models overly reliant on external investment rather than self-sustaining growth.
In this evolving environment, a new generation of African consultants and founders are rethinking what sustainable entrepreneurship should look like. One such figure is Victor Ekwealor, founder of Clarus, a Nigerian-based consultancy that offers “fractional go-to-market” services. Clarus helps startups, accelerators, and investors develop frameworks that convert ideas into viable, scalable, and resilient businesses. Ekwealor believes that the coming decade will demand discipline and clarity, rather than unbridled ambition.
Reflecting on the last ten years of African tech, he describes it as a period of “lenient investment and accelerated growth,” particularly between 2015 and 2022 when companies such as Paystack, Flutterwave, and Andela became global symbols of African innovation. Venture capital flowed rapidly, and securing investment was often viewed as synonymous with success. Founders focused heavily on expansion metrics—app downloads, user acquisition, and media visibility—while profitability and retention were frequently treated as secondary concerns.
That era, Ekwealor suggests, has ended. According to data from Africa: The Big Deal, funding for African startups fell by 25 per cent in 2024 to $2.2 billion across 488 transactions, a significant decline from the record highs of 2021 and 2022. This contraction reflects global financial tightening as rising interest rates reduced the availability of risk capital, disproportionately affecting emerging markets.
The downturn, however, may be a blessing in disguise. It has forced both investors and founders to recalibrate their expectations, prioritising long-term sustainability over short-term momentum. “We are seeing a shift from indulgence to precision,” Ekwealor notes, suggesting that the market is now rewarding sound operations and financial discipline rather than storytelling or speculative growth.
Ekwealor identifies five recurrent deficiencies that undermine startup success across Africa: unclear market positioning; misallocation of resources across marketing channels; neglect of user retention; disjointed internal collaboration; and a lack of consistent operational rhythm. Startups, he argues, often attempt to appeal to everyone while appealing to no one, scattering resources across platforms without assessing return on investment. This lack of focus, combined with the tendency to mistake activity for progress, leads to exhaustion rather than achievement.
Investors appear to share his view. Olu Oyinsan, Managing Partner at Oui Capital, told TechCabal earlier this year that the advice to African founders remains consistent: focus on fundamentals. “Reliable income, healthy margins, and steady, manageable growth,” he said, “are what sustain a company when the funding cycle cools.”
For Clarus, these principles translate into methodical systems that embed discipline into the heart of entrepreneurship. Each client engagement begins with an in-depth review of market entry processes—positioning, communication, buyer personas, conversion pathways, and retention mechanisms. The outcome is a customised growth architecture designed to track acquisition costs, customer lifetime value, and operational performance.
Ekwealor’s approach is shaped by more than a decade of experience across Africa, the United Kingdom, and Europe, working in media, marketing, and early-stage ventures. Before founding Clarus, he participated in family-run businesses ranging from aquaculture to telecommunications, experiences that grounded him in the importance of cost efficiency and measured growth. These lessons, combined with his exposure to structured European markets, have informed his belief that Africa’s entrepreneurial advancement requires both ingenuity and rigour.
The consultancy operates on a partial engagement model, allowing startups to access expertise and implementation support without the expense of full-time hires. This approach also appeals to investors, who benefit from greater visibility into their portfolios’ market performance. Clarus plans to expand its impact through the forthcoming Clarus Growth Lab, which will work with incubators, accelerators, and venture funds to instil market entry discipline as a standard component of startup development.
Through workshops, analytics tools, and progress tracking systems, the Growth Lab will enable entrepreneurs to make evidence-based decisions while giving funders clearer oversight of progress across their portfolios. Ekwealor envisions it as a foundational layer for the next stage of Africa’s innovation economy—one where scaling is deliberate, measurable, and repeatable.
He is careful to note that transformation will take time. “You cannot reform an ecosystem overnight,” he explains, “but we are witnessing an important cultural shift.” The market, he believes, is teaching through experience: those who prioritise fundamentals endure, while those who chase momentum falter.
The lessons are already visible. Across Kenya, Egypt, South Africa, and Nigeria, startups are beginning to move away from vanity metrics and towards more robust business practices. Incubators are embedding financial literacy and operational strategy in their curricula, while investors are demanding clearer roadmaps and evidence of customer retention before releasing capital. This recalibration marks a quiet but meaningful evolution in Africa’s entrepreneurial story—one that values substance over spectacle.
Clarus’s name, derived from the Latin for “clear,” encapsulates this ethos. It represents transparency, intentionality, and the conviction that African innovation must be built on enduring foundations rather than temporary fervour.
If the past decade was defined by exuberance, the next may well be characterised by endurance. The continent’s entrepreneurs are learning that success lies not in acceleration but in stability. By prioritising structure, foresight, and coherence, Africa’s startup community may yet transform high failure rates into a narrative of maturation—where setbacks are not signs of weakness but markers of an ecosystem learning to stand on its own.
