Africa and Latin America's venture totals ride on a few deals

The record

The African Private Capital Association published its Q2 2026 Venture Capital in Africa Report on 28 July 2026, reporting $2.0 billion invested across 182 deals in the first half of 2026, alongside $558 million raised by Africa-focused funds in final and interim closes, which it states already surpasses full-year 2025 fundraising even as deal volume fell 24 percent year over year. Crunchbase News published its Latin America year-end 2024 recap on 10 January 2025, recording $4.2 billion raised across seed-through-growth-stage rounds, a 27 percent increase from 2023, with Brazil taking close to half of the total and Mexico about a fifth.

What the sources establish

Both regions' totals sit on top of heavy concentration. AVCA states that companies operating across multiple regions took 72 percent of Africa's capital from just 13 percent of its deals, and that West Africa alone accounted for 31 percent of deal volume. Crunchbase states that Latin America's four largest rounds in 2024 all went to fintech companies, and that the region's 2024 total remained far below the peaks reached in 2021 and early 2022. Neither report's total describes a broad base of similarly sized deals across many companies.

Scope and revision

AVCA's own report separates deal-level investment from fund-level fundraising on the same page, the same distinction Invest Europe draws for Europe, and its figures moved in different directions in the same half: fundraising up, deal volume down. Africa's H1 2026 figure and Latin America's full-year 2024 figure cover different regions and different periods and are not designed to be added together into one emerging-markets total.

The decision in front of you

Before treating either region's headline growth or decline figure as evidence of a broad-based trend, a reader should check what share of the total came from the largest few deals. Editorially, in markets this concentrated, one large round can move a full year's percentage change on its own.

• What share of the region's total came from its largest handful of deals?
• Is the figure describing capital invested in companies or capital raised by funds?
• Do the two regions' figures cover the same period, or are they being compared across mismatched windows?

Africa and Latin America each have their own trackers describing genuinely volatile, concentrated markets, and a single cross-region emerging-markets total built from their headline numbers would flatten exactly the concentration each report goes out of its way to describe.