Open Startup turns 10 and bets on African deep tech with a new fund

Open Startup, a pan-African non-profit that has spent a decade helping founders turn ideas into companies, is marking its tenth birthday by narrowing its focus. On 29 June, the Tunisia-born organisation announced a new strategic direction it calls The Science Road, aimed squarely at African science and “deep tech” ventures. Alongside it comes Openers First, a new investment arm that will put early money into a selected few of those ventures.

The framing is a bet: that the continent’s next generation of valuable companies will come out of laboratories, not just app stores.

What “deep tech” actually means

If the term is unfamiliar, it is worth slowing down on, because it sits at the centre of this announcement.

Deep tech describes companies built on a genuine scientific or engineering breakthrough rather than on a clever app or a new way to move money. Think medical diagnostics, new materials, biotechnology, climate hardware, robotics, or applied artificial intelligence. These businesses usually start in a university lab, take years to develop, and need patient capital long before they earn a shilling of revenue.

That profile makes them harder to fund than the fintech and consumer platforms that have dominated African tech. Investors tend to prefer software, which reaches the market faster and returns money sooner. So science-led founders often get stuck in what the industry calls the “valley of death”: too advanced for a research grant, too early and too risky for a normal investor.

Why this matters beyond Tunisia

That gap is the problem Open Startup says it wants to attack, and the numbers around it explain the opportunity.

Most African venture money still flows to a few markets and a few sectors. We already reported that Kenya led the continent in 2025 with about US$984 million, part of a roughly US$3.2 billion rebound, with the “Big Four” of Kenya, Egypt, South Africa and Nigeria capturing 82% of all funding. Deep tech is a thin slice of even that. According to a recent analysis in Nature, African deep tech ventures have raised more than US$3 billion over the past decade, around 15% of the continent’s startup funding, while the research systems that feed them remain badly underfunded.

In other words, the science exists, the appetite is growing, but the pipeline from lab to company is broken in several places at once. That is the space Open Startup is trying to occupy.

Who Open Startup is

Open Startup began in 2016 as a university entrepreneurship competition in Tunisia and grew into a continental platform that connects founders with investors, corporations, universities and policymakers. The organisation says it has worked with more than 3,000 founders and over 1,000 startups across more than 20 African countries, supported by a community of mentors, advisers and trained coaches.

A note on those figures: Open Startup’s own website currently lists more conservative numbers, citing more than 600 startups supported, including over 40 deep tech ventures. The gap most likely reflects different counting, with the larger figures including lighter-touch engagements such as competitions and bootcamps on top of full acceleration. We have asked the organisation to clarify.

Its founder and chief executive, Dr Houda Ghozzi, is a former business strategy professor with a doctorate from University Paris Dauphine, and has long argued that Africa should add value to its own science rather than export raw potential.

How The Science Road is structured

The Science Road folds Open Startup’s existing programmes into one acceleration platform with two clear lanes. The first is for very early, pre-seed innovators trying to turn research into something investable. The second is for seed-stage startups ready to scale a proven technology.

Running underneath is Openers First, the new investment arm, which is meant to bridge the awkward gap between those two stages where many science ventures stall. A linked Science Road programme listing indicates that selected startups can become eligible for small investment tickets of up to US$20,000, about KES 2.6 million at current rates, to support their seed fundraising. That is modest money, but for a pre-revenue science venture it can be the difference between a prototype and a pitch.

Geographically, the plan stretches from Tunis to South Africa. Open Startup says it will deepen work with South African partners including CERI, Stellenbosch University and LaunchLab. CERI, the Centre for Epidemic Response and Innovation, is the Stellenbosch institute led by Professor Tulio de Oliveira, known globally for genomic surveillance during the COVID-19 pandemic. LaunchLab is the university’s startup incubator, which last year opened a dedicated biotech laboratory for science founders. These are exactly the kind of lab-to-market bridges deep tech needs, and they are still rare on the continent.

The money question

It is worth being clear about what was, and was not, announced.

Open Startup has not disclosed the size of the Openers First fund, who is backing it, or how many ventures it expects to finance. Its past work has leaned on a long list of partners, including KfW’s AfricaGrow, AfricInvest, Digital Africa, the European Union, the United States Department of State, and universities such as MIT and Columbia, so the ability to convene serious institutions is real. We have covered plenty of similar efforts before, from Google’s AI-focused accelerator cohorts to Microsoft-linked programmes, and the recurring lesson is that mentorship and visibility are easy to provide while patient capital is not.

Ghozzi herself frames part of the challenge as cultural. Speaking to CNBC Africa around the launch, she estimated that Africa has only 300 to 500 deep tech startups today, concentrated in South Africa, Nigeria, Ghana, Tunisia and Morocco, and said too few scientists yet see starting a company as a realistic path. Role models, she argued, matter as much as money at this stage.

So the practical takeaway is straightforward. A decade-old African accelerator is publicly betting that science ventures are the continent’s next growth engine, and is putting its own small cheques behind that view. What to watch now is not the rebrand but the money: how big Openers First turns out to be, how many science founders it actually funds, and whether larger investors follow it into a corner of African tech that has been easy to praise and hard to finance.