Pieter de Villiers is a South African born entrepreneur who spent years in Silicon Valley with a passion for mobile and the empowerment it leads to. Pieter is also one of the youngest mobile industry veterans with over 14 years of experience in global telecoms, mobile messaging and mobile payments. In 2013 Pieter launched the SiMODiSA initiative; focused at accelerating start-up success for South African entrepreneurs.
Matsi is Vice-Chairperson of SiMODiSA, an industry association whose mission is to accelerate entrepreneurship by collaborating with policy makers to enhance the success rate of high impact, high growth entrepreneurs. She is the founder of Furaha Afrika Holdings and sits on various boards including the Innovation Hub board and the Agrie-Vie Private Equity Fund Board of Advisory. Her experience ranges from Investment banking, enterprise development and building entrepreneurship ecosystems on the African continent.
Keet is a Venture Catalyst with extensive high-growth investment experience. He co-founded growth equity fund manager; Knife Capital, to continue the active management of HBD’s South African portfolio of investments and raise third-party funds for growth equity investments. Other companies co-founded: AngelHub, Grindstone Accelerator, KNF Ventures.
A passionate entrepreneurship advocate and development enthusiast at heart, Busi Raphekwane talks and walks enterprise development. She is the co-founder and director of The Transformation Legacy and has over 14 years business experience and 10 years in the enterprise development sphere as an entrepreneur development consultant and business mentor.
Her mission is to transform the SMME sector by developing sustainable SMME’s that can contribute meaningfully to the economy.
Jason co-founded Edge Growth with the mission of creating jobs by scaling ventures. He has also co-founded Vumela, a Venture Fund initially capitalised by The First Rand Group. Vumela makes investments in early stage, high growth firms. He later launched 10X-e, dedicated to helping successful founding teams Scale Up.
Jayshree Naidoo is a thought leader on Innovation and Entrepreneurship and is the CEO of YIEDI, a company that focuses on Innovation and Strategy Consulting, Incubation Design and Management, Entrepreneurship and Supplier Development and Digital and eLearning solutions She was recently identified as one of Fast Company SA’s most Creative People in Business for“Putting Entrepreneurs First.
Alison Collier is the Managing Director of Endeavor South Africa since 2019, bringing close to 20yrs of experience in Strategy & Business Development roles in Africa, Europe & Asia. . Alison has first-hand experience in establishing global offices for multi-nationals, expanding South African start-ups from into the global markets and raising capital to finance this growth.
Tshepiso is a property and infrastructure finance professional and a Learner at heart. Tshepiso currently serves as the CEO of SAVCA and a Non-Executive Director in NHFC.
