When the Money Runs Out: Inside Africa’s Biggest Fintech Collapses

The year 2025 was supposed to mark Africa’s fintech recovery. Instead, it became a reckoning.

Across Nigeria, Kenya, Ghana, and South Africa, companies that once raised tens of millions of dollars shut their doors. Some vanished quietly. Others collapsed amid fraud allegations, governance battles, and co-founder disputes that played out on social media. Together, these failures exposed fractures in how African fintech companies are built, funded, and managed.

The shutdowns were not simply about market conditions. They revealed deeper problems: inflated metrics, reckless spending, regulatory miscalculations, and in some cases, outright fraud.

The Dash Disaster: $86 Million Down the Drain

Ghanaian fintech Dash raised $86.1 million across five years to connect mobile money wallets and bank accounts across Africa, but shut down in October 2023 after burning through its entire war chest. The company’s collapse remains one of the most expensive failures in African tech history.

Founded in 2019 by Prince Boakye Boampong, Dash claimed to have five million users and processed $1 billion in transactions. Those numbers helped secure a $32.8 million seed round in 2021, the second-largest seed round ever raised by an African startup at the time.

But internal audits revealed a different reality. Boampong had misrepresented and exaggerated user numbers, and a subsequent audit uncovered a shortfall of at least $25 million that was unaccounted for. The company was burning $500,000 per month with no revenue.

Reports alleged that Boampong earned $50,000 monthly and diverted at least $8 million for personal use, including property and luxury vehicles. He was suspended in January 2023 and later fired. By the time replacement CEO Kenneth Kinshua took over, the damage was irreversible.

Dash’s regulatory troubles compounded its internal chaos. In March 2022, the Bank of Ghana forced the company to halt operations for operating without necessary regulatory approvals. The company never recovered from the dual blow of regulatory shutdown and financial mismanagement.

54gene: When Ambition Meets Reality

Nigerian genomics startup 54gene represented a different type of failure. The company raised $45 million to build Africa’s first biobank and provide genomic data to global pharmaceutical companies, but wound down operations in July 2023 after running out of cash.

Founded in 2019 by Dr. Abasi Ene-Obong, 54gene aimed to address the fact that less than 3% of genetic material used in global pharmaceutical research came from Africa. The mission attracted backing from Y Combinator, Adjuvant Capital, and Cathay AfricInvest Innovation Fund.

The company pivoted into COVID-19 testing during the pandemic, which temporarily boosted revenue. But genomics research is capital-intensive with long development cycles. When COVID testing revenue dried up, and the company failed to secure additional funding, it ran out of runway.

Leadership instability accelerated the decline. Over the past year before shutdown, 54gene had three CEO changes. Ene-Obong was removed in October 2022 following allegations of financial impropriety. His replacement, Teresia Bost, sued the company for creating a hostile work environment and slashing her salary. Ron Chiarello, who became CEO in March 2023, departed by July.

In August 2025, new details emerged. Ene-Obong accused the company’s largest investors of orchestrating its collapse by rejecting an $80 million capital injection and a $35 million acquisition proposal. A Lagos court blocked the sale of 54gene’s assets, including genomic data from 100,000 Nigerians, while the legal battle continues.

The 2025 Shutdown Wave

Dash and 54gene were early warnings. By 2025, the shutdown wave had spread across multiple sectors.

Nigerian API startup Okra shut down in May 2025 after raising over $16.5 million, returning an estimated $4-5.5 million to investors. The company had launched Naira-priced cloud services to address foreign exchange pressures, but intensifying competition and Nigeria’s currency depreciation made the economics unsustainable.

Kenyan buy-now-pay-later fintech Lipa Later was placed under administration in March 2025 after raising nearly $10 million. The company struggled with mounting debts following its acquisition of struggling e-commerce platform Sky Garden for approximately $1.9 million in late 2023.

Nigerian edtech Edukoya shut down in February 2025 despite raising $3.5 million in what was considered a standout pre-seed round. The company explored partnerships and merger talks, but could not make its business model work.

Fraud, Deepfakes, and Governance Failures

Not all failures were about poor economics. Some involved outright fraud.

South African trading platform Banxso collapsed in the biggest fintech fraud of 2025, using deepfake videos of Elon Musk and other public figures to promote fake trading systems. Victims lost life savings before the Western Cape High Court placed Banxso under provisional liquidation in August.

Nigerian fintech Thepeer quietly shut down in 2024, but co-founder Sultan Akintunde went public a year later with allegations that $50,000 was spent on car purchases for a company generating less than $1,000 in annual revenue.

Even successful companies faced governance crises. At Kenya’s M-KOPA, co-founder Chad Larson filed a complaint with regulators in November 2025, alleging the board orchestrated a share buyback that unfairly exploited Kenyan employees with artificially suppressed valuations.

Why They Failed

The pattern across these failures is consistent. Companies prioritized growth over sustainability. They spent aggressively to acquire customers before proving unit economics, and operated across multiple countries without sufficient revenue to justify the overhead.

Regulatory challenges compounded operational problems. In West Africa, regulatory changes from the BCEAO caused over 90% of fintechs in Senegal to report service interruptions after the May 1, 2025 deadline.

The funding environment shifted dramatically. In the first half of 2024, African tech startups secured $780 million, marking the lowest amount since late 2020 and a 57% decrease compared to the same period in 2023. Companies that had raised money assuming continued access to capital found themselves unable to secure follow-on funding.

What Comes Next

The ecosystem is adapting. Africa experienced one of its busiest years for tech-related IPOs in recent memory in 2025, with companies like Egypt’s Valu, South Africa’s Optasia, and Morocco’s Cash Plus going public.

Investors have become more selective. Capital is available, but narrower in scope, with investors more valuation-sensitive, more sector-focused, and more insistent on governance and compliance.

The failures have educational value. According to Launch Base Africa data, 68.3% of African founders who experience a shutdown never start another venture. But some are trying again. Meshack Alloys, who shut down logistics startup Sendy in 2024, launched fintech TABB by late 2025.

For investors, the lesson is clear. High funding rounds do not guarantee success. For founders, the message is sobering: growth without governance, inflated metrics, and regulatory shortcuts eventually catch up. The question now is whether the ecosystem will learn these lessons before the next funding cycle begins.