For years, listing on Nasdaq or the London Stock Exchange (LSE) has been the ultimate ambition for many of Africa’s most successful startups. But at the Johannesburg Stock Exchange (JSE) on Wednesday, a different vision took centre stage: Africa’s future tech champions should be built and eventually listed on African exchanges.
Africa has produced a growing number of billion-dollar startups, but its capital markets have yet to keep pace. That gap dominated discussions at the JSE on Wednesday during the African activation of the AT50 Index, a new benchmark designed to make Africa’s largest private technology companies more visible to institutional investors before they pursue listings or other liquidity events.
The rules-based benchmark, launched at the London Stock Exchange in January, is a market intelligence platform that measures the continent’s leading scaled private technology companies. After Johannesburg, the AT50’s next African activation will take place at the Egyptian Exchange in Cairo on September 23 as organisers continue engaging exchanges and investors across the continent.
The underlying message from Wednesday’s event was that if Africa wants globally competitive technology champions, it must also build universally accepted capital markets. For Gbite Oduneye, Chair of the AT50 Index, that begins by changing where founders look when they start thinking about life after venture capital.
Originally published by TechCabal.