South Africa’s start-up scene remains stable, maintaining its ranking at 52 in the global start-up ecosystem, the same as last year.
This is based on start-up ecosystem and research centre StartupBlink’s latest Global Start-up Ecosystem Index 2025, which ranks 100 countries and 1 400 cities.
Released annually since 2017, the index is built in collaboration with more than 100 ecosystem and global partners, including Crunchbase, Semrush and the UNDP. The data is also accumulated directly from StartupBlink’s interactive Global Start-up Ecosystem Map.
South Africa continues to lead the African region, as it has since 2020, but its growth rate of nearly 20% is the lowest among the region’s top three.
In addition, every city in SA’s top 1 000 ranking list experienced a decline in 2025, except for Johannesburg.
South Africa’s rankings over the last five years have ranged between 48, 49, 53 and 52 (for two consecutive years).
From a regional ranking perspective (Middle East and Africa), the Southern African nation was ranked in the top five, averaging between number three and four over a five-year period.
The country’s start-up ecosystem received $467.8 million funding in 2024.
“South Africa’s best industry is edtech, where it ranks 35th worldwide,” says the report.
“South Africa’s start-up ecosystem is not centralised, as the gap between Johannesburg’s total score is just 1.1 times that of Cape Town’s.”
South African major cities Cape Town and Johannesburg rank among the top 50 worldwide for the payments industry, as revealed by the index.
While Cape Town has often taken the lead in the index’s city rankings, it was outpaced by Johannesburg this year, which took over as the top-ranked city in the South African start-up ecosystem.
According to the report, Johannesburg has the highest growth rate in SA at more than 42%, climbing 17 spots globally to rank 122nd.
Cape Town has a slower growth rate at more than 13% compared to Johannesburg. It also fell 10 positions to 138th place globally. Cape Town is known for being home to tech heavyweights such as Naspers, Takealot, Aerobotics, Clickatell, GetSmarter, Yoco and Sweepsouth.
By comparison, in 2024, the Mother City jumped eight spots to rank 128th globally, while Johannesburg was up 17 spots to rank 139th.
Shifting to Pretoria and Durban, the cities now rank 429 and 644 globally, with both showing a decline in rankings. Last year, Pretoria and Durban ranked 426th and 547th, respectively.
Entering the rankings list for the first time is the Western Cape’s Paarl, at 1 257 on the global ranking in terms of cities driving innovation.
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