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.

The Maghreb region, a historic island between seas of water and sand at the far end of the Arab world, consists of five countries: Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, Mauritania and Libya. Up until quite recently, the region seldom made it into the discussion of the African startup revolution. It has, especially, existed in the shadow of Egypt, the North African market leader and one of the big four in the Africa startup scene, which also includes Nigeria, Kenya and South Africa. Excluding Libya, where consistent civil unrest continues to undermine its startup pulse, and Mauritania, which is relatively small and mostly underdeveloped, startups across the other three nations raised an estimated $72 million in 2021. Algerian startups raised $30 million; Morocco recorded an all-time high of $29 million; and Tunisia closed north of $23 million.

This is a landmark growth from the $20.1 million the entire region raised across 19 deals in 2020. But when you break these numbers down into deals and compare them to Egypt’s $600 million funding in 2021, the conversation on how disturbingly small the funding is takes the stage. While Egypt is still the leader, investors are beginning to open their coffers for the Maghreb ecosystem, and it has now raised over $260 million this year alone — over a 280% increase from what it raised between 2019 and 2021.