AU-Startups, the Lagos-based African tech media and data outlet founded and edited by Kess Daniel, has opened its Dealflow program to rolling applications from African tech founders raising between $25,000 and $1 million at pre-seed, seed, or Series A, in any sub-sector. There’s no deadline and no rotation queue: founders submit a pitch whenever their round is actually live, an internal venture-analyst team screens it against stage, traction and market fit, and accepted companies are placed on the next monthly board circulated to investors who subscribe to it across Africa, Europe, the Gulf and the US.
The qualifying criteria are specific. Companies need to be headquartered in or primarily operating across Africa, though diaspora founders building for the continent are explicitly welcome. A working product or signed letters of intent are required, idea-stage pitches aren’t accepted, and the round itself has to fall inside the $25,000 to $1 million band; larger raises get AU-Startups’ regular funding-round editorial coverage instead of a board placement. The process itself is short: a roughly ten-minute pitch submission, an editorial decision within 14 days that either accepts the company to the board, passes with a stated reason, or requests a follow-up call, and, for accepted founders, a board listing with a one-liner, traction, ask and deck that goes out to subscribing investors. Any resulting investor interest, a deck view, an intro request, a follow-up, lands in the founder’s own dashboard, and the founder decides who to respond to.
Worth stating plainly what’s checkable here and what isn’t. AU-Startups is a real, identifiable operation, this newsroom has drawn on its sector directories as a source before, and it’s not an anonymous or newly-spun-up page. What isn’t independently verifiable from outside the platform is the actual size or activity level of its investor subscriber base, the scale or credentials of its venture-analyst team, or a public track record of past board placements that converted into closed funding, none of that is published anywhere checkable, so treat those specific claims as the platform’s own account rather than confirmed fact. It’s also worth being precise about the word “free”: the pitch submission and the initial board placement cost nothing, but AU-Startups’ own platform shows that free listing runs for 30 days, after which continued visibility sits behind paid plans currently priced at $49 for six months or $89 for twelve.
AU-Startups screens across eight sub-sectors, fintech, agritech, climate tech, healthtech, commerce, logistics, SaaS and mobility, and its own pitch leans on fintech still pulling the largest share of African venture dollars. That framing is a little dated. Data from the first two months of 2026 shows fintech leading January with $131.6 million, then dropping to fourth place in February behind logistics and transport at $119.6 million (driven by Spiro’s and GoCab’s raises) and energy and water at $94 million (largely one SolarAfrica round). Single large deals can swing a sector’s monthly ranking hard, which cuts both ways, but it also means a sector-agnostic net cast across logistics, climate and mobility alongside fintech lines up with where early-stage capital has actually been moving lately, not just where it used to concentrate.
For anyone building in that $25,000 to $1 million window right now, the application is free to start and takes about ten minutes: Apply to AU-Startups Dealflow.
