Which East African startups should investors be watching in 2026?
The East African startups worth watching this year aren't necessarily the ones with the biggest valuations or the most headlines. They're the companies solving large, scalable problems in sectors such as mobility, healthcare, energy and agricultural insurance. What sets them apart is their ability to build solutions with genuine regional relevance, attract strategic capital, and demonstrate commercial traction that holds up past the pilot stage, the same infrastructure-first pattern that defined M-Pesa's own evolution from a payments app into a full financial stack.
This piece covers five companies across four countries, why each one matters, and the broader trends they reveal about where East Africa's tech ecosystem is actually heading, as distinct from where the headlines say it's heading.
Why These Five Companies?
This list is built on a few consistent factors: market opportunity, commercial traction, recent funding or strategic partnerships, regional expansion, and evidence of a working business model rather than just a promising pitch. It deliberately skips over companies with real momentum in sectors currently in retreat, East African freight-tech in particular has had a rough 2025, with well-known names either shutting down, restructuring, or taking distressed funding rounds, since a “watch list” should point toward where the wind is blowing, not just where it blew a few years ago.
Together, these five companies offer a snapshot of where East African innovation is heading next.
1. Ampersand
What they do: Ampersand builds and operates battery-swap infrastructure for electric motorcycles across Rwanda and Kenya.
Why they're worth watching: Africa's roughly 30 million commercial motorcycles represent a $25 billion annual fuel market, and Ampersand has positioned itself as the infrastructure layer underneath the shift away from petrol. The company now powers more than 6,000 electric motorcycles, delivering over 20,000 battery swaps a day, and outsells competitors 9-to-1 in Kigali and 4-to-1 in Nairobi where riders have a choice. In August 2025, Ampersand closed a new funding round backed by British International Investment, Seedstars Africa Ventures, Gaia Impact, and TotalEnergies, aimed at doubling its battery fleet and reaching 13,000 motorcycles by early 2026. It's also opened its charging network to third-party motorcycle brands like Wylex, and struck a manufacturing partnership with BYD to build 40,000 electric motorcycles by the end of 2026, a bet that the real value sits in owning the energy network, not just the vehicles riding on it.
The bigger trend: This reflects the growing race to own East Africa's electric mobility infrastructure, not just its vehicles. As battery-swap networks open up to competing manufacturers, the winners increasingly look less like vehicle brands and more like utility companies.
2. Rocket Health
What they do: Rocket Health is a Ugandan telemedicine and last-mile healthcare provider offering teleconsultations, lab sample collection, and medicine delivery.
Why they're worth watching: Founded in 2012 and Uganda's longest-running telemedicine platform, Rocket Health built its base by solving a structural problem: Sub-Saharan Africa has one of the world's lowest patient-to-doctor ratios, and most of the specialists who do exist are concentrated in cities. A 2022 Series A led by Creadev brought funding of $5 million and pushed expansion into Kenya. The more significant recent development is regional consolidation rather than standalone growth: Rocket Health has merged with Kenya's MYDAWA, a digital pharmacy and health platform also backed by Creadev, Alta Semper, and AAIC, to form a larger cross-border digital health group. Leadership at the combined entity has confirmed plans to deploy Rocket Health's telemedicine technology into the Kenyan market through MYDAWA's existing infrastructure.
The bigger trend: Rather than every healthtech startup independently trying to build teleconsultations, pharmacy delivery, and diagnostics from scratch in each new market, the more capital-efficient path emerging in East African digital health is consolidation, merging complementary platforms to cover more of the patient journey across more countries at once.
3. SLS Energy
What they do: SLS Energy, based in Kigali, builds energy storage systems for telecom towers and mini-grids using batteries salvaged from electric vehicles and electronic waste.
Why they're worth watching: This is the smallest and earliest-stage company on this list, worth including precisely because it represents a different kind of opportunity than the venture-scale plays elsewhere on it. Founded in 2021 by CEO Léandre Berwa, SLS Energy repurposes retired lithium-ion batteries into battery-as-a-service power backup for telecom infrastructure, addressing two problems simultaneously: Africa generates roughly 2.9 megatons of e-waste annually with only a fraction of it recycled, and unreliable grid power remains a persistent cost for telecom operators. The company has been recognised through RES4Africa's Young Talent of the Year award and Qualcomm's Make in Africa mentorship program, and is now working with UK-based Hinckley Recycling and Innovate UK to scale its recycled-battery model across the continent.
The bigger trend: As East Africa's electric mobility sector matures, a second-order opportunity is opening up around what happens to all those retired EV batteries. SLS Energy is an early bet that battery circularity, not just battery deployment, becomes its own investable category.
4. Zembo
What they do: Zembo sells electric motorcycles on lease-to-own terms and operates a battery-swap network across Kampala and its surrounding region.
Why they're worth watching: Founded in 2018, Zembo took a more homegrown, financing-first approach to the same electric motorcycle opportunity Ampersand is chasing at greater scale. Its lease-to-own model lets boda boda riders, who typically can't access formal vehicle financing, own an electric motorcycle after roughly two years of payments, while saving up to $500 a year in fuel and maintenance costs. Zembo's most significant recent move came in November 2025: a partnership with Tugende, one of Uganda's most established asset-financing companies, combining Tugende's lending expertise with Zembo's charging network to expand into Masaka, Jinja, and Entebbe by mid-2026.
The bigger trend: Zembo and Ampersand solving overlapping problems with different playbooks, infrastructure-first scale versus financing-first partnerships, says something useful on its own: East Africa's electric motorcycle opportunity is large enough to support multiple, genuinely different business models at once, rather than converging on a single winner-take-all approach this early.
5. Pula
What they do: Pula is a Kenya-headquartered insurtech that designs and distributes climate risk insurance for smallholder farmers across Africa and Asia.
Why they're worth watching: Roughly 97% of smallholder farmers in Africa lack access to formal insurance, despite carrying nearly all the climate risk in their livelihoods. Pula, co-founded in 2015 by CEO Thomas Njeru and President Rose Goslinga, closed a $20 million Series B in April 2024, led by BlueOrchard with participation from the IFC and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, bringing total funding to roughly $26 million. The company has since protected more than 15.4 million farmers across 22 countries, bundling insurance premiums directly into the cost of seeds, credit, or input packages so farmers don't have to separately seek out and pay for cover. Its research reports that insured farmers increase farm investment by an average of 16% and improve yields by 56%, figures that help explain why 80% of Pula's distribution partners renew their coverage each year.
The bigger trend: Pula's growth is part of a broader shift in African agritech away from pure productivity tools and toward risk management infrastructure, insurance, credit, and traceability, that determines whether a good harvest actually translates into a stable livelihood.
What These Startups Tell Us About East Africa's Tech Ecosystem
A few patterns cut across all five companies, and they say more about the region's direction than any single company does on its own.
Infrastructure is beating standalone apps. Ampersand, Zembo, and SLS Energy are all, in different ways, building physical or financial infrastructure, charging networks, financing rails, battery circularity, rather than a consumer app layered on top of someone else's infrastructure. That's a meaningfully harder business to build, and a meaningfully harder one to displace once built.
Regional expansion is happening early, not as an afterthought. Ampersand operates across Rwanda and Kenya from a young stage; Rocket Health's merger with MYDAWA was explicitly framed around cross-border reach; Pula operates in 22 countries. None of these companies waited for total dominance in a single home market before expanding.
Consolidation, not just competition, is shaping outcomes. Rocket Health's merger with MYDAWA is the clearest example: in a capital-constrained environment, combining complementary platforms is proving to be a more realistic path to regional scale than every company independently building every layer of its own stack.
Climate and resilience are becoming core business models, not side features. Ampersand and Zembo sell cleaner transport as a cost-saving product first and an environmental one second; Pula sells climate insurance as financial protection first. In each case, the sustainability story is inseparable from the commercial one, not bolted on afterward.
Final Thoughts
East Africa's next generation of technology companies is being shaped less by hype and more by execution. The startups attracting genuine attention in 2026 are solving practical, high-impact problems across industries that matter directly to the region's economic future, moving people, keeping people healthy, powering infrastructure, and protecting farmers from the climate risk that threatens their livelihoods every season.
For investors, these companies are worth watching not simply because of where they are today, but because of what they reveal about where East Africa's innovation ecosystem is headed: toward infrastructure over apps, regional scale over single-market dominance, and resilience built into the business model rather than added on top of it.
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