Meet the Investor: Zachariah George
BY TOM JACKSON ON NOVEMBER 26, 2024
Having worked on Wall Street for a decade doing M&A for Lehman Brothers and Barclays, Zachariah George first landed in South Africa to watch some football matches during the 2010 World Cup. But having spotted a major gap in the market, he never left, and 14 years later is an active angel investor and heading up Launch Africa Ventures, the continent’s most active VC firm.
“I realised that there was almost no tech ecosystem in the country, well, on the continent really,” George told the latest episode of “The month in VC”, Disrupt Podcast’s regular deep-dive into all things African venture capital.
So George got busy. Actively angel investing, he built the Tech Lab Africa accelerator in partnership with Barclays, which was eventually sold to Techstars before George and Philip Kiracofe brought Startupbootcamp, one of the biggest accelerators for B2B and B2B2C startups in Europe, to Africa.
“We ran Startupbootcamp AfriTech for four years until 2019. We had an incredible three cohorts, with some really big names like Kuda, Yobante Express, and Curacel part of that,” George said.
It was during this time that he realised that there was a big lack of funding post-accelerator, at the pre-Series A stage, for African tech ventures. Alongside Janade du Plessis, head of venture capital at Nedbank, one of Startupbootcamp’s banking partners, George decided to build a fund that invested in the best companies coming out of accelerators on the continent.
