953 startups have been labeled in nearly five years. This means that the goal of labeling 1,000 startups set for this program launched in early 2019 has not been achieved, although it narrowly missed.
At Smart Capital, the management company in charge of implementing the Startup Tunisia initiative, they assure that it will be achieved by January 2024. However, this is not the only bad news at the beginning of 2024. There is another, even worse one.
After a strong start in March 2019 (with 192 labels granted) and significant progress in the following two years (209 and 243 labels, respectively), the labeling program seems to be losing momentum. Indeed, the number of labeled startups has sharply declined since 2022.
It dropped by nearly 30% – to 158 – in 2022, settling at only 151 in 2023 (as of eleven months, statistics for December are not yet available), making the past year one of the worst in terms of labeling startups.
On a monthly average, 2021 remains the best year with 20.1 accepted applications per month, followed closely by 2019 with 19 labels per month – but only for 9 months since the procedure started in March of that year. The year 2020 ranks third (17.4), followed by 2022 (14.3) and 2023 (13.7).
The pre-labels granted in five years amount to 419. They follow the same trend as the labels. From 59 in the first nine months of 2019, their number increased to 98 the following year and 103 in 2021, before dropping to 85 in 2022 and further to 74 in 2023. Again, 2021 is the best year in terms of average labels granted per month with 8.5, closely followed by 2020 (8.1), and 2022 (7.7). Next are 2023 (6.7) and 2009 (5.9).
There are a total of 1,372 startups between labeled and pre-labeled. In total, 2,026 startups applied in five years to obtain a label. The number of candidates has also progressed similarly to the number of labeled and pre-labeled startups. From 317 in the first nine months of 2019 (from March to December), it jumped to 417 in 2020 and 478 in 2021, before decreasing to 368 in 2022 and then rising again to 456 in 2023.
Monthly, the number of candidates for labeling followed the same trend. It went from 31.7 applications per month in 2019 to 33.9 the following year and then to 39 in 2021. After decreasing to 33.4 in 2022, it peaked at 41.4 applications in 2023.
Finally, there is double good news. On one hand, some pre-labeled startups have moved up to the higher category, that of labeled startups. Over the last two years, a total of 141 have been counted, almost evenly distributed between 2022 (75) and 2023 (66).
On the other hand, some startups have been stripped of their labeled status by having the label initially awarded to them revoked. However, besides the fact that their number is very low – 11 in 2022 and 13 in 2023, totaling 24 in the last two years – the often-cited reason for such a measure does not diminish the credibility of the concerned startups: "The company has exceeded the maximum age of 8 years set by Law 20-2018 for companies benefiting from the label," as explained on the Startup Tunisia website.
Original Article : 2023, une des plus mauvaises années en matière de labellisation des startups