Endeavor South Africa’s Harvest Fund Announces Second Investment into Africa’s Leading Cybersecurity Platform, Sendmarc
Endeavor South Africa, a non-profit organisation that identifies and supports innovative, high-impact entrepreneurs in emerging markets to scale, announces a second investment of its fund, Harvest venture Capital II, into South African startup, Sendmarc.
This latest funding round to grow Sendmarc’s cyber security business in South Africa and beyond is led by South African-based Venture Capital Firm, Kalon Venture Partners and is a follow-on injection from their initial investment in January last year. “Having Endeavor on board really validates the problem that Sendmarc is solving and provides the team access to their global network of entrepreneurs and investors” says Clive Butkow the CEO of Kalon Venture Partners.
Established in 2018 by entrepreneurial trio Sam Hutchinson, Sacha Matulovich and Keith Thompson, Sendmarc provides the setup, implementation and reporting functionality for a global email protection standard known as DMARC (Domain Message Authentication, Reporting and Conformance). The protocol is designed to give email owners the ability to protect domains from unauthorised use, such as impersonation attacks or email spoofing and helps prevent scamsters stealing domain names to send hoax emails. By accelerating the implementation of DMARC, Sendmarc not only fulfils a real and growing need, but enables organisations to protect themselves as well as their customers and suppliers from growing cyber attacks.
“We welcome the support and continued commitment of the Kalon team and are really excited to have the Endeavor SA’s Harvest Fund on board not just as strategic investors, but as co-investors too,” says Sendmarc CEO, Sam Hutchinson. “The latest round of funding gives us a great runway to supercharge our growth path both in South Africa and internationally.”
Sendmarc has seen significant growth since its launch and is now processing 400 million emails per month on its platform while growing 30% month-on-month. Its customers include 35 JSE-listed companies as well as a growing list of customers in the US, UK, Ireland, Germany and South America.
The company is becoming a leading cybersecurity platform in Africa, solving the phishing and spoofing problem. Its expansion plans include entering and continuing to grow in international markets, while the company continues to build its presence in South Africa.
“Sendmarc is an Endeavor Entrepreneur — one of 28 in the country — and we are delighted to be able to co-invest and support this dynamic team,” says Antonia Bothner, Capital Lead at Endeavor.
The structure of the Harvest Fund is unique in that it allows for 20% of the carry to be reinvested back into the ecosystem. This means that as companies like Sendmarc perform, a portion of this gain will be shared back into the South African entrepreneurial ecosystem, to help grow the next set of high impact entrepreneurs. The upshot of this is that the impact of the fund is expected to be multiplicative over time. Over the past two years, Endeavor South Africa’s portfolio of 28 firms collectively generated R2-billion in revenue and created more than 4,600 jobs. The Fund will continue to build on this track record, investing in an expanded portfolio of high-impact firms in the region, providing ongoing tailored mentoring to these businesses, and reinvesting the Fund’s successes back into the Southern African ecosystem.
For more information, go to https://endeavor.co.za.
