On November 26, Emerging Valley 2025 returned to Thecamp in Aix-Marseille, bringing together African and European founders, investors, development financiers and public institutions for a dense main-stage program that made one thing clear: the relationship between Europe and Africa is shifting from aid and pilots to corridors, co-investment and shared digital sovereignty. This report is based on on-site coverage of the full main-stage program. Parallel workshops and labs added further depth, but the heartbeat of the summit played out under the main spotlights.
Marseille as a hub between Africa, Europe, the Gulf and Asia
Emerging Valley has steadily positioned Aix-Marseille as one of the main interfaces between African ecosystems and European capital and institutions, with this ninth edition explicitly widening the lens to the Gulf and the new IMEC corridor that links India, the Middle East and Europe.
Local leaders from the Aix-Marseille-Provence Metropolis and the City of Marseille opened the day by framing the territory as a testbed where African startups can land in Europe without losing their roots, and where European institutions can experiment with new kinds of partnerships instead of pushing one-size-fits-all programs from Brussels or Paris.
From early morning, the main stage agenda was already very clear: finance, public policy and technology were not treated as silos, but as intertwined levers to redraw how innovation flows between Africa, Europe and now Asia and the Gulf.
New frontiers of venture capital between Europe and Africa
The first big debate, “Next Frontiers of Venture,” gathered Launch Africa’s Uwem Uwemakpan, Plug and Play’s Yves Cabanac, Enko Capital’s Alix Pinel and Flat6Labs’ Faten Aissi alongside public representatives from Aix-Marseille-Provence and Emerging Valley founder Samir Abdelkrim. They explored what it really means to open “new routes of investment” across Europe, Africa and the Mediterranean, beyond buzzwords.
The discussion made three tensions obvious.
First, geography versus thesis. Investors are under pressure to deploy capital regionally, but the strongest theses are now cross-border: pan-African plays with a European anchor, or Euro-Mediterranean funds that accept political and FX risk in exchange for access to overlooked markets.
Second, corporates versus classic VC. Corporate venture units are increasingly using pilots in Africa as strategic R&D instead of CSR, but founders are blunt about the risk of “pilot purgatory” when corporates move too slowly or never scale a proof of concept.
Third, angel networks versus big funds. The panel repeatedly came back to syndication between African business angels, diaspora investors and later-stage funds as the only realistic way to close early-stage gaps while keeping cap tables healthy for future rounds.
Rather than promising a flood of capital, the session painted a more sober picture: capital will go where there is execution, local knowledge and clear exits, and that requires stronger ecosystem bridges, not just more conferences.
Digital sovereignty in the age of AI
One of the most striking moments on the main stage came when France24 journalist Fatimata Wane opened the session “Quelle souveraineté numérique à l'heure de l’Intelligence Artificielle” by asking the room a simple series of questions: who uses Google, WhatsApp, Apple’s cloud, or ChatGPT? Almost every hand went up. The message was brutal and honest. Europe and Africa are deeply dependent on a handful of American and, increasingly, Chinese platforms.
OVHcloud executive Adil Tourabi walked through the technical and regulatory roadblocks that still prevent truly sovereign cloud infrastructures: lack of regional data centers, fragmented regulation and uncertain long-term demand from public sectors that have not fully digitized their services yet. Orange Ventures’ Rémi Prunier and PaySika cofounder Stezen Bisselou-Nzengue added the startup perspective, insisting that sovereignty is useless if local players cannot build competitive products on top of those infrastructures.
In the second half of the session, the conversation moved from infrastructure to AI. Tourabi underlined a simple triad for any serious sovereign AI strategy: reliable data, sovereign or at least European data centers, and access to GPUs, plus the talent to use them. Without that, talk of “African AI” remains marketing.
Another important point came from the policy side: initiatives such as Smart Africa and African Union workstreams on digital policy show there is already momentum toward shared rules between African states and the European Union, but those efforts need political backing and money to scale. Otherwise, Africa will continue training models on opaque, mostly Western datasets, baking in biases it did not choose.
An observatory for Francophone Africa’s innovation reality
Immediately after the sovereignty debate, EY partner Mounir Ghazali took the stage to launch the new “Observatoire de l’Innovation en Afrique francophone subsaharienne,” an 80-page barometer built in partnership with Emerging Valley.
The study’s starting point is encouraging: there is real vitality in Francophone Sub-Saharan ecosystems, with a growing number of startups, hubs and support programs. But Ghazali did not gloss over the structural problems that founders had already raised in private conversations throughout the day. According to the observatory, entrepreneurs still face:
- a legal and tax environment perceived as unfavorable,
- heavy and analog public administration,
- limited digitalization of government services,
- territorial and sectoral inequalities,
- and innovation that is still poorly integrated into national policy priorities.
The call to action was clear: use the observatory as a shared tool, not a PDF that dies in inboxes. Ghazali urged public actors and ecosystem builders to treat the report as a starting point for structured public-private dialogue, not just a one-off launch on a shiny stage.
Can development banks really fund innovation at scale?
The next main-stage roundtable asked a politically sensitive question: how can public development banks stop behaving like slow, risk-averse agencies and instead become genuine engines of African innovation. Representatives from AFD, IFC, Caisse des Dépôts and Janngo Capital discussed mandates, risk appetites and the uncomfortable truth that many public instruments are still not designed for startups.
Speakers emphasized the need for clearer innovation windows inside development banks, more blended finance between concessional capital and private investors, and closer ties with local intermediaries that actually understand early-stage startups instead of just large infrastructure projects. It was one of the rare conversations where public banks openly acknowledged that their procedures can kill time-sensitive chances for founders.
Is African AI in a bubble or a defensive bet?
Later in the morning, the panel “Anticiper la bulle qui vient: investir sur l’IA africaine en temps de turbulence” confronted the current hype cycle head-on. On stage, investors and operators from firms such as 216 Capital and founders involved in AI and digital education laid out what they are seeing on the ground.
From an operational standpoint, they insisted that demand for AI-enabled solutions is real across sectors like fintech, logistics and education, and that clients are now asking more often for concrete deployments rather than pilots for their slide decks. At the same time, funding trends clearly show excesses in valuation and copy-paste business models imported from the United States or Europe without enough adaptation to local constraints.
The emerging consensus was pragmatic. There will be corrections. Some African AI startups funded in the past two years will not survive. But precisely because African markets are more frugal and less flooded with speculative capital, the best teams could benefit from a global reset if they focus on revenue, capital efficiency and real productivity gains, not vanity metrics.
Awards, soft landing and the Provence Africa Connect bridge
Midday, the tone shifted from analysis to celebration with the Awards Ceremony for the Provence Africa Connect Prize and the Invest In Provence labels. The program highlighted startups that are literally using Aix-Marseille as a launchpad, such as Polychaeta, ClinicAgro and Lead Provider, recognized for their cross-border potential between Africa and Provence.
These awards do not just offer visibility. They are anchored in a broader “Soft Landing Provence Africa Connect” program that helps African founders test the French and European markets through tailored support, connections to local corporates and investors, and visibility at events like Emerging Valley.
In the evening, African startups from that soft-landing track pitched on the main stage, outlining their plans to establish operations in Provence while keeping core teams and markets in their home countries. It was a concrete illustration of the “dual anchoring” that policy makers had been talking about all day.
Financing strategies, new corridors and the art of the pitch
The afternoon main-stage sessions kept the focus on finance, but from different angles. “Stimuler l’innovation: stratégies de financement pour un écosystème performant” brought together AfriLabs, 500 Global, Breega, KEYENN and Fanaka&Co to dissect how founders should sequence their fundraising between grants, angels, local seed funds and international VCs. The key message was that there is no single “path,” but founders need to understand the expectations attached to each kind of capital before signing.
Later, “Mediterranean - Gulf - Asia: Vers un nouveau corridor du financement de l’innovation” mapped out a new axis of capital between the Mediterranean, GCC and Asian investors. Speakers from Sultan Ventures, Uncovered Fund, Doha Business Consulting and Sunny Side Venture Partners showed how deals are already starting to move along this corridor, especially in climate, health and logistics. For African founders, the opportunity is to play all three regions against each other strategically, rather than relying only on European money.
The day ended with two very concrete moments on stage. First, a hands-on “Killer Pitch” session where investors and founders deconstructed what makes an effective fundraising pitch in front of real funds, highlighting structure, storytelling and, above all, clarity on metrics and capital use. Then, the final pitches from the Soft Landing Provence Africa Connect startups brought the conversation full circle, back to founders who are already executing.
Attendees have already described Emerging Valley as a place where “Africa invents its own models” instead of copying dominant ones. From the main stage on November 26, that shift felt real, not theoretical. Investors spoke less about “untapped potential” and more about concrete ways to adapt instruments. Public institutions admitted their blockages in front of startup audiences. Panels on AI sovereignty, deeptech and impact investing did not hide the risks of dependency, bubbles and greenwashing.
At the same time, that new narrative comes with responsibilities. If Marseille and Thecamp are going to function as a true Euro-African innovation hub, then:
- development banks will have to move from declarations to faster, more flexible products,
- European and African regulators will have to cooperate seriously on data and AI rules,
- and investors will have to back more first-time African fund managers, not just a handful of usual suspects
From the main stage, Emerging Valley 2025 felt less like yet another “Africa tech” conference and more like a stress test of how serious everyone really is about shared innovation between the two continents. The ideas are on the table, the observatories are launched, the corridors are mapped. What happens between this edition and the next will show whether the ecosystem can match its words with execution.