Nathalie Burrows, Editor at EBnet

The message from the 2026 SAVCA VC Conference was clear: South African venture capital is no longer simply making the case for its existence. It is now grappling with the harder, more consequential work of building a deeper capital base, improving liquidity, making regulation more workable, commercialising intellectual property and helping founders scale companies that can compete globally.

Held under the theme Ignite: Unlocking the Next Era of Private Capital, the conference brought together fund managers, allocators, development-finance institutions, founders, regulators and ecosystem builders. Across the day, the discussion moved from the mindset required to deal with an uncertain future to the practical obstacles still standing between a promising startup ecosystem and a consistently investable, exit-ready venture market.

A case for future thinking

Futurist Dr Craig Wing opened the conference with a useful challenge for an audience whose business is, in essence, making bets on the future: stop trying to predict one version of it.

Drawing on his Four Future Seasons framework, Wing argued that conventional strategic planning often makes two flawed assumptions. First, that the past can be extrapolated neatly into the future. Second, that there is a single future toward which organisations are travelling. In reality, he said, the future is plural, uncertain and shaped by changes that may already be visible but unevenly distributed.

That matters for venture investors. The temptation is to look at the last winning model, the last successful founder profile or the latest technology hype cycle and assume the same formula will work again. Wing cautioned against that instinct, using examples such as NFTs, 3D printing and the Metaverse to illustrate how easy it is to confuse an exciting narrative with a durable investment thesis. The challenge is not to be anti-technology or anti-innovation, but to become better at spotting signals, testing assumptions and preparing for multiple possible outcomes.

His underlying point was behavioural as much as strategic. Investors may know that markets and technology are changing quickly, but knowledge is not the same as understanding. Deeply held habits, familiar decision making patterns and cognitive biases can make it difficult to respond to change even when it is obvious. For a VC industry assessing founders, markets and technologies under uncertainty, that is a timely reminder that the biggest blind spot may not be the market. It may be the investor’s own mental model.

From hype to evidence

The first fireside chat brought the conversation down from foresight to performance. Moderated by Stephan Lamprecht of VS Nova, the session explored whether the South African VC ecosystem has reached a point of genuine maturity – particularly in relation to capital under management, fund manager capability, exits and realised returns.

The mood was notably more confident than it might have been a few years ago. Speakers pointed to recent industry performance data suggesting that roughly R2 billion of investment had produced around R5 billion in value, implying about 2.5 times money invested. While the number of fully realised funds and exits remains relatively limited, the figure was presented as a meaningful data point: it compares credibly with international benchmarks and gives institutional investors a more substantive basis for considering VC allocations.

There was also an important discussion around what “value add” really means in a smaller, more hands-on ecosystem. Gladwyn Leeuw of ESquared Investments described the operational intensity sometimes required of a local VC investor, recounting the experience of stepping in as interim CEO of delivery business OneCart during a period of rapid pandemic-era growth. The story underlined a defining feature of local venture capital: investors may have to do considerably more than provide funding and a board seat.

The session also highlighted the global potential of South African-founded businesses. One portfolio-company example discussed had scaled emergency-response technology into 24 US states, raised $92 million and generated annual revenue of around $20 million. The lesson was that South African ventures can build globally relevant products – but they need strategic market access, credible co-investors, operational support and early preparation for international scale transactions.

Capital must circulate

The capital-allocation panel, moderated by Paula Mokwena of Fireball Capital, focused on a question that sits at the centre of the next growth phase: who will finance South Africa’s venture market, and on what terms? The panel featured Anne-Marie Chidzero of FSD Africa, Zach George of Launch Africa Ventures and Noluvo Nela of Edge Growth Ventures.

A key takeaway was that VC is becoming better understood by institutional investors, even if it has not yet become a mainstream strategic allocation across the market. Nela described a shift from opportunistic, case-by-case investment decisions toward more structured assessment of venture as an asset class. Her own fundraising journey illustrated a blended-capital model: a development-finance investor initially helped catalyse the strategy, followed by participation from a local bank at first close.

But the biggest issue was liquidity. Zach George argued that early-stage investing cannot function properly if seed investors must wait a decade or more for a full exit. In more mature ecosystems, secondary transactions enable angels, early funds and employees to realise part of their value, recycle capital and keep financing the next generation of companies. Launch Africa Ventures, he said, had completed 20 exits in five years, with many achieved through secondaries.

His point was not that funds should abandon ambition or sell their best companies too early. Rather, emerging market fund managers should avoid importing Silicon Valley assumptions wholesale. A portfolio may need a blend of partial exits, trade sales, secondaries and long-term winners. In a market where unicorn outcomes are harder to underwrite and late-stage capital is scarce, turning good R2–R5 outcomes into realised capital can be just as important as holding out for the elusive 10x.

Chidzero added the development-finance perspective: the task is not only to solve a venture capital problem, but also to address wider frictions in the financial system. That includes developing new structures and platforms that can unlock private investment, support early stage risk and create pathways for capital to move through the ecosystem.

Regulation and growth

If liquidity was the dominant capital market issue, regulation was the major structural constraint. The conference’s policy session, moderated by SAVCA’s Safeera Mayet, focused on the practical difficulty of building internationally competitive companies while working through South Africa’s exchange control, intellectual property and tax frameworks.

The discussion did not suggest that there has been no progress. In fact, speakers emphasised that rules around offshore structures and IP transfers have become more flexible compared with the pre-2017 environment. The problem is that uncertainty, process complexity and approval timelines still create friction at precisely the stage when high growth businesses need to move quickly to raise offshore capital or structure themselves for global expansion.

The regulatory sandbox initiative was presented as a practical route forward. Instead of debating challenges at a high level, startups, advisers and investors are encouraged to bring real transactions to policymakers and regulators. The aim is to develop a clearer, repeatable understanding of what compliant transactions should look like – including offshore holding-company structures, IP arrangements and share swaps – so that founders do not have to start from scratch each time.

The obstacle, however, is participation. Panelists noted that startups understandably worry about becoming the first “guinea pig” and sharing sensitive deal information. Yet the message to the ecosystem was that meaningful policy improvement will require more openness, more case studies and more trust. If the sandbox can produce a practical manual for authorised dealers and regulators, it could reduce both uncertainty and cost for future high-growth companies.

AI, deep tech and capability

The afternoon keynote from Jason Goldberg of The Art of Scale brought AI into sharp focus. His central argument was that AI should not be viewed simply as a productivity tool. It is a general-purpose technology with the potential to reshape the cost of expertise, cognition and problem-solving – much as earlier technologies reshaped the cost of energy or physical labour.

For investors, the key question is straightforward but demanding: what becomes cheaper and less valuable as AI improves, and what becomes more valuable? Goldberg used the example of software tools whose valuations have come under pressure as AI makes it easier for businesses to build or customise capabilities that were previously expensive and difficult to access. In contrast, firms that embed proprietary expertise, strong data, distribution, trust and AI-native operating models may become more defensible.

He also urged fund managers to support portfolio companies beyond the investment cheque. Successful scaling, he argued, still rests on basics: a leading position in a valuable niche, the right leadership team, scalable systems and decentralised management. AI does not remove those requirements; it raises the cost of getting them wrong and expands the upside for companies that get them right.

Later sessions on deep tech and the next investment cycle reinforced this theme. South Africa has scientific capability, research institutions and potentially globally relevant IP across biotechnology, health innovation, clean energy, advanced materials and frontier technologies. Yet scientific excellence does not automatically produce investable businesses. The ecosystem still needs to bridge the gap between lab-based innovation and commercial traction, with founder support, market access, appropriate capital, regulatory clarity and experienced operators all playing a role.

Three key highlights

1. The ecosystem has evidence but needs more exits. South African VC is beginning to demonstrate credible returns and global success stories. The next test is whether it can create reliable liquidity – through trade sales, secondaries, acquisitions and other exit routes – that recycles capital back into earlier-stage ventures.

2. Capital alone will not solve the growth challenge. Institutional participation is improving, but scaling companies also requires operational support, commercialisation expertise, international networks and better prepared founders. The strongest funds are increasingly expected to deliver all of these.

3. The future will favour adaptable investors and companies. Whether the issue is AI disruption, a changing regulatory environment or a more demanding global funding market, the conference repeatedly returned to the same idea: success will depend on the ability to question assumptions, learn quickly and build for more than one possible future.

ENDS