Two weeks in Cape Town — and a door sign in Stellenbosch
A holiday, no research plan. Still: African tech funding grew by a quarter in 2025, South Africa led the continent on equity rounds — and in Stellenbosch there is a sign carrying almost exactly my own company's name.
I was on holiday. Two weeks in Cape Town and Stellenbosch, no research plan, no meetings worth the name. You still can't switch off what you notice professionally — and what you notice there is a remarkable density of people building something. Coworking floors on Bree Street with a fintech next to an agritech next to a climate-sensing company. And a striking number of people who aren't founding a startup right now, but raising a fund.
That's the part that stayed with me. Not the startups — startups exist everywhere. It's that the capital is organising itself alongside them.
The numbers
For the continent as a whole, the same report counts roughly US$4.1B in equity and debt across 570 rounds — up about 25% from US$3.25B in 2024, and the strongest year since 2022. Europe, over the same period, stands still: Atomico puts 2025 venture investment at around US$44B, essentially flat year on year and broadly unchanged since 2023.
Datentabelle
| Investment 2025 | |
|---|---|
| Europe | 44.000 US$M |
| Africa | 4.100 US$M |
Values in millions of US dollars. The two figures come from different reports using different methods — the African one includes debt, which hit a record share in 2025. They are good for the order of magnitude, not for the decimal place.
Quelle Africa: Partech Africa, “2025 Africa Tech Venture Capital” (equity and debt, 570 rounds). Europe: Atomico, “State of European Tech 2025” (full-year projection).
This chart is the most honest part of the piece, and it says the opposite of what travel euphoria usually produces: the entire African continent moves roughly a tenth of what Europe moves. Anyone who comes back from Cape Town saying "the next Silicon Valley" hasn't looked at the axis.
Growth from a small base is easy. Standing still on a large base is expensive. Both are true, and only one of them feels like the future when you're standing in it.
The difference isn't size. It's direction — and the mood attached to it. In Munich we've spent three years discussing why it's getting harder. In Cape Town they're discussing who opens a fund next.
Stellenbosch
Forty minutes inland, between vineyards and mountain ridges, sits a university town with a founder density you would never guess from the outside. Stellenbosch University's LaunchLab, started in 2015, reports having supported more than 400 ventures, which together generated over one billion rand in revenue and raised some 971 million rand in investment. The university runs its own technology fund alongside it — and is working on a second one.
The door sign
And then, on Ryneveld Street in the middle of Stellenbosch, a sign: Baleine Capital.
First floor, Andmar Building, number 7 — the same address the Dun & Bradstreet directory carries. And what else it carries is the actual joke: filed under Nondepository Credit Intermediation, subcategory personal credit institutions. So: not venture capital. Lending. Headcount, revenue and year started are modelled estimates behind D&B's paywall; a registry lookup adds an entry dating to July 2003. Nothing about the numbers is publicly solid, which is why none of them appear here.
I had, honestly, expected a fund. "Capital" in the name, Stellenbosch, a university with its own technology fund two streets away — the mind fills in the rest by itself. That's exactly the mistake the chart above warns about, just one shoe size smaller.
My company is called Balane. Not after an animal, but after Balanstraße in Munich, where it sits — about as unromantic an origin as you can get. Baleine, meanwhile, is French, and means simply: whale. And Ryneveld Street lies barely an hour's drive from a coast where southern right whales pass through from June to November, a good nine thousand kilometres south of Balanstraße.
Two names you could not tell apart over the phone, on two streets, eleven flight hours and no time difference apart. One named after a Munich arterial road, one — presumably — after what swims past the end of the other.
I took it for a coincidence, which of course it is. But it fits what AGULHAS.ONE is about: the link between European and African technology isn't the case because anyone decided it should be. It's the case because the same things are being built at both ends, in similar vocabulary, occasionally under nearly identical names — and too rarely does anyone talk about it.
Next time I'll ring the bell.