This article was co-written with Yehia Houry, Managing Director, Flat6Labs Tunisia.
In 2019, Tunisian startups raised more from investment funds than the previous three years combined. And the COVID-19 crisis of 2020 doesn’t seem to have stopped this growth: agritech startup NextProtein announced the closing of their EUR10 million Series A investment, the largest VC round raised so far in the country, in May 2020.
Tunisia, in spite of being a small market of 11 million people and suffering from sluggish economic growth that followed the Arab Spring in 2011, is growing to become an innovative and vibrant VC market. The country’s footprint within the innovation space across the region is growing quickly. By around the same time last year, Tunisia had made it to the prestigious list of top five MENA countries in terms of number of investment deals, quite an achievement given that the country had never even made it to the top ten before.
