Endeavor South Africa: Quartertly Newsletter July 2023
Dear Friends of Endeavor,
Winter has arrived in the Southern Hemisphere with beautiful snow too, but so has Summer in the North as most of Europe and the US prepare to take their annual holidays. No matter what season you find yourselves in, we are pleased to share the highlights not just from our local office in South Africa but from around our global network — one for all seasons!
Endeavor has continued to host world class events, expand and open new offices around the world, celebrate significant capital raises and exits, welcome new global and local entrepreneurs into the fold and launch a new local Fund with Harvest Fund III. Here’s what has gone down in Q2 of 2023.
Events are a key feature of Endeavor so we’ve collated the upcoming not to be missed meetups, conferences, and connect events all in one link here: click, signup and don’t miss out.
One of the benefits of being part of the Endeavor community is access to a globally community high-impact entrepreneurs. To date, this year, over twenty global Endeavor events have been hosted across the globe from Abidjan to Barcelona to Cairo and across the Atlantic to San Francisco and New York.
In May, over 85 of the top Endeavor Entrepreneurs (Outliers) met up in San Francisco, in a 75-acre luxury retreat nestled in a redwood forest just south of Silicon Valley, for the sixth outlier retreat. They flew in from all over the world to share their insights, shed their armour, and be real with one another about the personal side of running their businesses. Local attendees included Dare Okoudjou of MFS Africa, Pieter de Villiers of Clickatell, and Tjaart van der Walt of Tymebank, and the feedback has been exceptional, take a minute to click on the video above, if only for the redwood forest.
And we have more events coming up, please join us for the renowned Annual Worldwide Endeavor Entrepreneur retreat taking place in Istanbul, Turkey on the 18–20th September. A number of our local Endeavor entrepreneurs have confirmed attendance this year and we’d like to invite more to sign up to meet with your fellow EEs around the world. Please speak to any of the Endeavor staff if you’d like more details.
Also in Europe, please join us for the 97th International selection panel taking place in Rome in October, this is the final step in a 12–18 month Endeavor selection process and is probably the single most significant event for those entrepreneurs intent on becoming part of the Endeavor network. There will be over 200 Endeavor Board members, candidates, mentors, and observers present. Please get in touch if you would like to join.
News from the Endeavor global offices and entrepreneurs
The Endeavor community is growing, new offices were opened in 2022 in Pakistan and Poland and this year Portugal opened its doors, led by Managing Director Ricardo Mesquita. As a reminder Endeavor launches in under-served markets with a pipeline of potential high-growth entrepreneurs with a vibrant start-up scene that is lacking in scale and support but with local “pull” from top businesses leaders. Watch this space for openings in New Zealand and Ukraine.
These six entrepreneurs joined Endeavor over the past quarters (two from Africa):
Local Endeavor Capital news and welcoming the new Local Scale Up joiners for the quarter
South African challenger bank, Tymebank raised $77.8 million in a pre-Series C round.
Demonstrating the appetite for investment in clean energy, we’re thrilled to share that SA-based solar startup Yellow raised $14m in a Series B funding round.
We warmly welcome the 6 new teams that joined our Local Scale Up sponsored by The SASME Fund, which included:
- John Kitenge from Param Solutions,
- Christiaan van den Berg & Heine Bellingan from JobJack,
- Velani Mboweni & Xabiso Nodada from Lula,
- David Botes from Smartload,
- Alexandra Miszewski from Novita, and
- Jeremy Leach from Inclusivity Solutions.
Endeavor South African hosted a number of events hosted by our Board members and expert mentors, specifically targeted for our entrepreneurs and aimed at topics such as ChatGPT, Commercial roundtables and Partnerships for growth.
On ChatGPT we hosted 4 session by 4 expert mentors, Andreas Cambitsis (Director, Business Science Corporation), Byron Rode (CTO, YeboFresh), Dirk Tolken (Co-Founder & CMO, Semantica Digital) and John Bradshaw (Group exec: Customer, PEP) with a follow up virtual session on the technical component for developers taking place on the 1st of August. This continues to be an important topic.
Entrepreneurs were also invited to a session on Building and Maintaining Your Board with Colleen Larsen, Cheryl Kujenga and Bharti Harry.
We hosted two in person entrepreneur-focused commercial roundtable discussions hosted by Board members Barry Swartzberg, CEO at Vitality Global & Co-Founder at Discovery Ltd and Nadya Bhettay, ex-Vodacom Chief Strategy Officer, as well as by Endeavor Entrepreneur Coenraad (Coen) Jonker from Tymebank.
The final series has been on Partnerships for growth and working with multinationals. The next session takes place on the 26th July and will be hosted by Kerryn Anderson from Wyzetalk and Andy Wilson, Lead Partner at Digital Co-X from Vodacom. Also, we are planning more in the fintech space hosted by our Endeavor SA Board Chair Herman Bosman and Gordon Little (CEO of FNB Commercial).
Save the date for our Connect event, open to our network, on the 5th of October where Marc Herson will be hosting a session with Noah Glass, a world renowned American technology entrepreneur and software developer, whose early work included launching Twitter and Odeo. Noah is the Founder & CEO of Olo (the interface between restaurants and the on-demand world) and will be speaking about his entrepreneurial journey.
Significant Global Capital events for Q2 that continue to inspire us
Endeavor Entrepreneur Pismo (Brazil) was acquired by Visa for $1 billion, making it the largest Fintech deal of the year. It will use this moment to scale its global footprint to more than 200 countries after — that’s impactful! Read more here.
In far out news across the network, Endeavor companies Satellogic (Argentina), D-Orbit (Italy), OBSS (Turkey) and Platzi (Columbia) created 4 separate satellites used on the SpaceX Falcon 9 — we think that’s cool, read more about these companies here.
Endeavor Entrepreneur Peter De Caluwe, Founder and CEO of Thunes, announced a US$60M Series C; Endeavor Entrepreneurs Dimeji Sofowora and Adegoke Olubusi, co-founders of Helium Health, announced a US$30M Series B and Endeavor Entrepreneurs Ghufron Mustaqim and Arip Tirta, Evermos co-founders, announced a US$39M Series C.
Endeavor SA and Harvest Fund in the SA media
Following on from the success of Harvest Fund III, Endeavor SA has doubled down and launches a second rules-based fund Harvest Fund III of $30m to back their entrepreneurs. The fund is targeting 25 to 30 investments within an existing pipeline of 127 Endeavor companies. Harvest Fund III is on track for a first close of R150 million in September this year and has seen good interest, not only from existing investors, but also from institutional investors, and in particular, pension funds. Read more about it in this press release.
We are delighted to share the figures from Endeavor SA’s Harvest Fund II portfolio of 17 companies which delivered 123% annual revenue growth and created 2,800 jobs in 2022; 75% for black South Africans and 90% for youth. These 17 fintech, telecoms services, edtech, retail and consumer tech companies are powerful growth and employment engines and demonstrate that successful entrepreneurs don’t rely on a thriving economy or political stability to succeed. This well penned article by Hilary Joffe highlights the significant contribution that high-growth start-ups make in SA even with a sluggish economy, and have a listen to this interview on Cape Talk Radio which fleshes out this good news story.
In conclusion, we’d like to echo the messages recently shared in the media reports and in our own words: The performance and job creation figures reflect a venture capital sector that is resilient, vibrant and provides over-indexed growth results in South Africa. No matter their resources, our entrepreneurs are rich in human capital. They are problem solvers and are driving innovation and raising private capital through the work that they do, and that’s what we are investing in.
So whichever season you find yourself in, know that we are championing you all the way. Wishing you a restful mid-year break.
Alison Collier
