# Top 10 Retail Startup Investors in South Africa in May 2026

## Vinny Lingham
- Type: Angel
- Location: San Francisco Bay Area, California, United States
- Relevant deals: 2
- Stages: Seed, Angel
- Focus: Blockchain, Internet, Cryptocurrency

Vinny Lingham is Co-Founder & CEO at Civic. He was the founder and CEO of Gyft, a mobile gift card app that allows customers to buy, store, send and redeem gift cards conveniently from their mobile device.
He is also the founder of Yola.com, a web development and hosting company that enables users without prior programming knowledge to developwebsites.
Vinny is the recipient of numerous awards, including Top Young ICT Entrepreneur in Africa (2006) and was also a finalist for Men’s Health Best Man (2009) and ICT Personality of the Year in South Africa (2008). He also previously founded Clicks2Customers, which also won the Top Technology Company award in South Africa in 2006.
He has previously served on marketing advisory boards for Nasdaq listed Valueclick and Yahoo, was also selected as an Endeavor “High Impact Entrepreneur” in 2006. Vinny studied a B.Com (Information Systems) at the University of Cape Town.

## Icon Ventures
- Type: VC Fund
- Location: Palo Alto, California, United States
- Relevant deals: 1
- Stages: Series C, Series B, Series D
- Focus: Software, Information Technology, Enterprise Software

The road to success is long. Re-defining an industry requires passion, perseverance, and true grit. At Icon Ventures, we help entrepreneurs with true grit navigate the journey to become icons of tomorrow.

## Ignition Partners
- Type: VC Fund
- Location: Los Altos, California, United States
- Relevant deals: 1
- Stages: Series B, Series A, Series C
- Focus: Software, Enterprise Software, SaaS

Ignition is a venture capital firm dedicated to helping the best entrepreneurs seize opportunity. With over $2B under management, Ignition invests in emerging and future leaders in enterprise software.Ignition brings together an unparalleled combination of domain focus, technical expertise, and global operational experience. Ignition'spartners are proven business leaders who have built some of the world's most successful businesses of the last two decades, including Microsoft Windows and Office, McCaw Cellular Communications, AT&T Wireless and Starbucks.Ignition helps entrepreneurs by turning their early idea into a business, to hiring the right team, providing the right industry and functional insight and connections, to growing the business strategically, globally, financially, to realizing the best ultimate outcome, Ignition is ready to go the distance.

## CRE Venture Capital
- Type: VC Fund
- Location: New York, New York, United States
- Relevant deals: 1
- Stages: Seed, Series A, Pre-Seed
- Focus: Financial Services, FinTech, Software

Founded in 2015, CRE Venture Capital invests in early stage tech companies that are levered to Africa. CRE is headquartered in the New York metro area, with a regional office in Lagos, Nigeria.

## Savannah Fund
- Type: VC Fund
- Location: Nairobi, Nairobi Area, Kenya
- Relevant deals: 1
- Stages: Seed, Series A, Pre-Seed
- Focus: E-Commerce, FinTech, Information Technology

Savannah Fund is a seed capital fund specializing in US$25,000-US$500,000 investments in early stage high growth technology (web and mobile) startups in sub-Saharan Africa. Initially focused on East Africa, the fund aims to bridge the early stage/angel and venture capital investment gap that currently exists in Africa. The Fund expects toachieve this objective by combining capital with mentor networks both in the region and from Silicon Valley via an accelerator program and a follow-on independent seed fund.The fund is managed by an experienced and technology savvy team that have founded companies or are actively involved in angel investing or having run successful accelerator programs in past but also understand the unique Subsaharan African environment. They are backed and supported by both local, regional and international networks of angels,venture capitalists whose expertise we can draw on to help startups succeed and scale to fully fledged regional or global companies.They believe in the potential for Africa to become a global technology innovator by creating sustainable for profit companies that create jobs and make an impact.

## Crossfin Technology
- Type: VC Fund
- Location: Cape Town, NA - South Africa, South Africa
- Relevant deals: 1
- Stages: Series A, Private Equity
- Focus: Payments, Financial Services, Information Technology

Crossfin invests in FINTECH solutions to enable growth for economies in Africa and beyond. Crossfin invests in high growth and established cash generative businesses, offering investors a blended exposure to technology investments in Fintech.

## Llew Claasen
- Type: Angel
- Location: Cape Town, NA - South Africa, South Africa
- Relevant deals: 1
- Stages: Seed, Series A
- Focus: Logistics, Health Care, Mobile Apps

Llew is the Managing Partner of Newtown Partners, an early-stage venture capital firm that actively invests in emerging, disruptive technology startup businesses. Founded and run by internationally successful entrepreneurs, Vinny Lingham and Llew Claasen, Newtown Partners has an entrepreneurial focus that goes beyond investment. The team operatesout of offices in Cape Town, South Africa and Sunnyvale, California (Silicon Valley).Llew is a go-to-market strategist with almost two decades of senior management experience in cryptoassets (since 2012), digital product management and digital marketing.He co-founded Clicks2customers (rebranded to www.nmpidigital.com) with Vinny Lingham, now a global digital marketing agency with annual billings in excess of $100 million and Synthasite (rebranded to www.yola.com).Llew is also the former Executive Director of the Bitcoin Foundation, the original, the oldest and the largest Bitcoin advocacy organization globally, headquartered in San Francisco, U.S.Llew has a Masters degree in the Management of Technology & Innovation and lives in Cape Town, South Africa.

## Newtown Partners
- Type: VC Fund
- Location: Cape Town, NA - South Africa, South Africa
- Relevant deals: 1
- Stages: Seed, Series A
- Focus: Logistics, Health Care, Information Technology

Newtown Partners is a venture capital firm that actively invests in emerging, disruptive technology startups.

## Vumela Fund
- Type: VC Fund
- Location: Hyde Park, Newtownabbey, United Kingdom
- Relevant deals: 1
- Stages: Seed, Debt Financing
- Focus: Education, Software, Primary Education

Vumela was established in 2009 by FNB Business Banking and Edge Growth. The objective was to create an innovative model for the development of a sustainable and a financially and operationally independent investment business which invests in high growth small, medium and micro size enterprises with good economic and impact returns.Vumela wascapitalised in 2010. Within the first four years, we’d invested R90 million into eight high growth SMEs, and created a total of 400 jobs. They launched their second fund in 2015, after a further investment of R100 million from FirstRand and R127 million from the Jobs Fund. Within the first year of launching this second fund, we’ve committed R43 million to five investments that are expected to create over 1800 new jobs.The first fund of its kind in South Africa, Vumela’s main goals are to invest in and develop entrepreneurial companies in order to help alleviate poverty in South Africa by creating jobs, and to generate a return for its beneficiaries: the Shalamuka Foundation and the FirstRand Group.

## Michael Jordaan
- Type: Angel
- Location: Stellenbosch, NA - South Africa, South Africa
- Relevant deals: 1
- Stages: Seed, Series A
- Focus: SaaS, Education, Financial Services

Michael Jordaan, the former banker now heads up a private investment company, Montegray Capital and lends a strategic-hand to various businesses, including as Chairman of Wines of South Africa (WoSA), Chairman of consumer data buro, Compuscan and as Director on the JSE. Michael also actively invests as a partner in AngelHub Ventures, a SouthAfrican based Venture Capital Fund.In 2014 he co-founded a coding apprenticeship program, ProjectcodeX, to grow highly skilled software developers to fuel the digital economy.

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