Stellenbosch | Cape Town Tech Bridge - Stellenbosch Edition - "The Secret to Raising Millions"

Zach is the Managing Partner at Launch Africa Ventures - Africa's most prominent and active early-stage VC Fund with a portfolio of 140+ tech ventures across 20+ countries. He is also the Co-Founder and Chief Investment Officer of Startupbootcamp AfriTech – the leading multi-corporate backed venture accelerator program in Africa.

Zach is a prominent Angel investor in 50+ leading tech startups in Africa including Flutterwave, KudaBank, Mono, Marketforce and several others. He was featured on the cover of Fast Company (May 2018), Destiny Man (Nov 2019), Forbes (Aug 2023), and on several occasions on CNBC Africa. In 2020, he was recognized as one of the Top 4 Most Influential Persons in Technology in Africa by Les Echos (the French equivalent of the Financial Times).

Zach was formerly the head of Africa Investments for U-Start – the largest network of private Multi-Family offices in Europe. Prior to moving to South Africa, he was an investment banker on Wall Street covering mergers & acquisitions, corporate finance strategy and risk management at Lehman Brothers and Barclays Capital, New York.

Zach has a Master’s degree in Finance & Management from Stanford University and a Bachelor’s degree in Mechanical Engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology.

Outside of his professional life, Zach is an acoustic guitarist, pianist and vocalist with cover albums ‘Give A Little’ (2010) and ‘Humans with Hearts’ (2018) on iTunes and Spotify. He is an avid lover of theater and the performing arts, likes hiking and a good game of tennis and squash. He enjoys creative writing and is currently busy finishing a work of non-fiction.

Patrick brings over 15+ years of business and technology, strategy expertise combined with a personal passion for building and scaling companies.

Today he serves as Co-Founder at Happy Pay. Happy Pay is building a responsible Buy Now Pay Later (BNPL) platform to drive financial inclusion in South Africa and across Sub-Saharan Africa.

Patrick also provides his strategic fintech, payments, banking and startup operational expertise to Bolster. (YCS21).

Previously, Patrick held various roles executive roles including SVP of Strategic Initiatives at FISPAN, Director of Strategic Initiatives within PayPal’s Omni Payments group and Director of GTM Platforms/E-commerce. In these roles, he supported senior leaders in driving forward PayPal’s transformational and strategic initiatives across various product lines and business units.

He was the Co-Founder and served as RentMoola’s CEO building the company from the ground level to a payments business that today is a high growth and innovate fintech company in the rent and utility payment vertical processing payments across North America.

Patrick’s vision was to build an innovate payments company within a payment vertical that had not seen any innovation in decades. Rent. RentMoola was a pioneer in developing the emerging rent payment vertical with Visa, MasterCard, American Express and BMO Bank of Montreal along with industry enterprise platform partners.

Patrick’s story in building RentMoola has been published in Fintech Founders: Inspiring Tales from the Entrepreneurs that are Changing Finance - it is a collection that includes some of the most successful fintech entrepreneurs that help the word understand the challenges and opportunities of applying technology and collaboration to solve some key problems of the financial services industry.

Patrick was born in Zurich, Switzerland and has lived, studied and worked all over the world including Zurich, Toronto, London, Hong Kong, Shanghai, Vancouver, San Francisco and Cape Town.

Jacqueline, a co-founder of Autoscriber, is passionate about using data to unlock the future of medical consultations. Her vision is for personalized, transparent, and accessible healthcare for all.

Jacqueline's background positions her perfectly to lead this charge. She is an Industrial Engineer with a PhD in Machine Learning and Natural Language Processing (NLP). This expertise, coupled with her passion for data-driven problem solving, fuels her desire to make a significant impact in both healthcare and education.

Jacqueline's entrepreneurial spirit extends beyond Autoscriber. She has been involved in the founding of several other ventures, including KnowledgeMarker (which uses technology to connect employees), Kool Beans (a nitro cold brew coffee company), and Caliparks (a company that provides outdoor workout equipment).

Mark is a serial entrepreneur, chess champion, and generative software innovator with over 20 years of experience in the tech industry. He co-founded Trixta, a platform that helps aspiring tech entrepreneurs to ideate and build software better, faster, and cheaper without a CTO or big funding.

At Trixta, Mark leads the strategy of the platform, which allows you to build software at the speed of ideation, with interacting swarms of: humans + AI-assistants + autonomous-AI-agents.

Experienced Co-Founder of FlexClub with a demonstrated history of working in the financial services industry. Skilled in Financial Technology, Alternative Credit Models, Start-ups, Operational Management and Leadership. A strong business development professional with a Bachelor of Commerce (BCom) focused in Economics

Kieno's is a seasoned media personality with a two-decade career as a commercial Talk Show Host and music radio presenter. His passion for innovation recently led him to transition from traditional media.

Today, Kieno's leverages his experience by collaborating with South Africa's leading entrepreneurs. He works alongside Stephan Eckbergh, Africa's top travel entrepreneur, as co-founder of Innovation City in Cape Town. This venture is a partnership with Epicenter Stockholm, a premier innovation hub in Sweden.
Kienos' influence extends to education as well. He currently serves as Head of Culture for UCT Online High School. This role came about after Robert Paddock, co-founder of the successful Get Smarter (acquired by 2U) and The Valenture Institute (a WEF-recognized top 10 Ed-tech company), approached him. The Valenture Institute is now one of Kienos' clients.

Kieno's is actively engaged in fostering collaboration in innovation and driving educational revolution. These passions represent the exciting new chapter in his career.