Top 10 Retail VC (Venture Capital) Funds in South Africa in January 2026
A list of 10 VC (Venture Capital) funds that invest in Retail startups based in South africa. We rank investors based on the number of investments they made in Retail companies from South africa. We update this investor list every month.Top 10 Retail VC (Venture Capital) Funds in South Africa in January 2026
| Investor | Retail South Africa investments |
|---|---|
| Flourish Ventures | 2 |
| TLcom Capital Partners | 2 |
| Presight Capital | 1 |
| CRE Venture Capital | 1 |
| Crossfin Technology | 1 |
| Icon Ventures | 1 |
| Savannah Fund | 1 |
| Vumela Fund | 1 |
| Newtown Partners | 1 |
| Ignition Partners | 1 |
We are an early-stage global venture capital firm investing in fintech founders.
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Investment focus
- FinTech, Financial Services, Finance
- Series A, Series B, Seed
- United States, India, Brazil
Portfolio highlights
- Liquid — A plataforma definitiva para CFOs maximizarem liquidez e receita.
- Reserv — We are a premier claims platform, born from state-of-the-art data intelligence and talent management technology.
- CipherOwl Inc — CipherOwl delivers AI-powered digital asset intelligence and automation tools for institutions, helping banks, exchanges, and crypto teams manage risk, ensure compliance, and operate with confidence.
TLcom Capital, is an Africa focused tech VC, with offices in Lagos, Nairobi and London. TLcom had been investing since 1999 in Tech, Media, Mobil and Internet companies across Europe, US and Africa, which is the exclusive focus of its most recent TLcom TIDE Africa funds.
TLcom manages total commitments of approximately 300 million USD in thesesectors via a series of dedicated investment vehicles. Our investment strategy is to identify, back and assist world class entrepreneurs and management teams with disruptive technologies and business models, compelling intellectual property and deep market knowledge.
We primarily target companies focused on Africa as a prime market, in the following investment themes: Access to Data Service; Financial Services; eCommerce; B2C applications (including but not limited to: health, education, energy, media and entertainment); and Software solutions to corporates and SMEs.
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Investment focus
- Software, Mobile, Information Technology
- Series A, Funding Round, Seed
- Nigeria, United States, United Kingdom
Portfolio highlights
- Hub2.Io — Welcome to HUB2, the leading FINTECH startup in interoperability and payment infrastructure in Francophone Africa. We are proud to work with all financial industry players in Africa who need stable and high-performing infrastructure, and contribute to their success.
- Talstack — Talstack is an all-in-one platform for employee growth and development
- littlefishapp — Littlefish is a comprehensive commerce platform that empowers banks to serve small business with tools to streamline operations, drive growth, and enhance customer engagement.
A simple static landing page for Presight Capital.
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Investment focus
- Biotechnology, Health Care, Financial Services
- Seed, Series A, Series B
- United States, United Kingdom, Germany
Portfolio highlights
- Divibank — Divibank is a financing platform offering businesses access to growth capital.
- Tern Group — Tern Group is an AI Platform to hire and relocate top healthcare talents globally, faster and cheaper. TERN is a full-stack solution to source and relocate top-tier medical and engineering talent from India, North Africa, South Africa, and Central Asia and the approach ensures a seamless, ethical, and transparent migration process, drasticallycutting complexity and shaving costs for healthcare systems.
- General Fusion — General Fusion is developing fusion energy: a clean, safe, abundant and on-demand approach to generating electricity.
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.
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Investment focus
- Financial Services, FinTech, E-Commerce
- Seed, Series A, Pre-Seed
- South Africa, Nigeria, United States
Portfolio highlights
- Andela — Unlock the power of global tech talent with Andela. Hire experienced professionals quickly and cost-effectively. Build your team from our robust network of skilled specialists spanning 175 countries. Our AI-powered platform ensures a 96% talent match success rate. Get started now and hire with confidence.
- Flowcart — Sukhiba is a decentralized community-based commerce platform.
- Cutstruct — Cutstruct is your one source for bulk construction materials purchase. Get the best prices for cement, steel, granite, sharp sand wood, and more.
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.
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Investment focus
- Payments, Financial Services, Information Technology
- Funding Round, Series A, Private Equity
- South Africa, United States, Russian Federation
Portfolio highlights
- Adumo — We are your expert partner in payments, enabling you to seamlessly and securely accept payments in-store and online with our true omni-channel experience. Never miss a sale with South Africa's largest independent payments processor.
- VantagePay — VantagePay provides white-label payment and technology solutions to the Banking, Telco, Financial Services, and Consumer Product Industries.
- Momint — Momint is the Web3 investment platform of the future. The safest and easiest to use NFT marketplace in the world. Discover the real-world potential of NFTs.
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.
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Investment focus
- Software, Information Technology, Enterprise Software
- Series C, Series B, Series D
- United States, Israel, Canada
Portfolio highlights
- Medeloop — Medeloop is an end-to-end AI-driven platform for early stage clinical research and trials.
- HelloCreator — HelloCreator harnesses the power of AI and LLMs to provide creators with a virtual team to help them navigate the complexity and emotional demands of pursuing their craft in the digital world.
- Global Worldwide — Global Worldwide have been global leaders in Agriculture, Materials Science, Autonomous Weapon Systems, and Pharmaceutical Testing since our inception in 1945. Each division of the company has led its respective industry through productive, science-based innovation to meet the needs of customers and
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.
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Investment focus
- E-Commerce, FinTech, Information Technology
- Seed, Series A, Pre-Seed
- Kenya, United States, South Africa
Portfolio highlights
- Oze — OZÉ brings African small businesses into the digital era. It is an app that makes it easy for businesses to track sales, expenses, and customer information. The data is analyzed to provide tailored recommendations, reports, and business education. If the entrepreneur needs a little extra support, an OZÉ Coach is just a click away. As they are usingOZÉ to manage their business and learn how to run it better, we are learning about them. Using this data and machine learning, we can predict their credit risk and provide them with affordable capital from our banking partners. With over 20,000 registered users, OZÉ is the largest online community of SMEs in Ghana. The most exciting thing is that OZÉ works; 97% of businesses that have used OZE for at least 9 months are growing or profitable or both!
- Root — Launch digital and embedded insurance solutions with omni-channel distribution.
- Afropolitan — Afropolitan is building a Network State to unleash the maximum potential of Africans around the world. Are you interested? Join us with your email.
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.
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Investment focus
- Education, Software, Primary Education
- Funding Round, Seed, Debt Financing
- South Africa, Brazil
Portfolio highlights
- Rentoza — We champion giving you access, affordability and flexibility to explore tech on your own terms
- Kusini Water — Kusini Water builds water treatment systems from nanotechnology and macadamia nut shells.
- Trade Shield — Trade Shield's aim is to increase access to trade credit facilities for those companies that most need them and will benefit the most from them.
Newtown Partners is a venture capital firm that actively invests in emerging, disruptive technology startups.
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Investment focus
- Logistics, Health Care, Information Technology
- Seed, Series A, Funding Round
- South Africa, Ghana, Kenya
Portfolio highlights
- MDaaS Global — At MDaaS Global, we build and operate modern, tech-enabled diagnostic centres in clinically-underserved communities, starting in Nigeria. Our big goal is to create affordable healthcare solutions for Africa's next billion.
- Chefaa — Chefaa is a GPS-enabled pharmacy benefits platform connecting patients & pharmacies nation-wide to help patients manage all their pharmacy needs. Chefaa uses big data, data ming & machine learning
- Waspito — We are the platform that engages Africa into the conversation and action to drive affordable and accessible quality healthcare across the continent.
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.
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Investment focus
- Software, Enterprise Software, SaaS
- Series B, Series A, Series C
- United States, Canada, United Kingdom
Portfolio highlights
- Skytap — Skytap is the best cloud service to run IBM Power and x86 workloads natively in the public cloud. Explore our solutions today.
- Hipmunk — Hipmunk is a travel search site that aims to take the agony out of travel planning. Their mission is to help people book travel faster and more efficiently. Hipmunk was designed to help people who are overwhelmed with pages of irrelevant search results. Hipmunk presents flight results in a visual timeline that allows people to select the bestflight for them at a glance. Hotel results are shown on a map so that people can view wherein a destination they will be staying and the landmarks near them.
- mFoundry — mFoundry is the most popular mobile banking solution in the U.S., the choice of more than 800 banks and credit unions nationwide. mFoundry's award-winning mBanking platform is the leading software-as-a-service (SaaS) mobile banking solution in the financial services industry today.mFoundry has an extensive partner network that includesFIS, Open Solutions, COCC, PSCU Financial Services, NCR, CO-OP, First Data and PayPal. These partnerships, combined with its extensive implementation experience and flexible SaaS-based architecture help it deploy mobile banking solutions quickly.While known best for its mobile banking innovation, mFoundry has also demonstrated leadership in mobile payments, leading Starbucks Card Mobile, the most successful mobile payments program to date, currently used across more than 6,800 Starbucks.mFoundry was founded in 2004 by Drew Sievers and Rodney Aiglstorfer. The company is headquartered in Larkspur, California, with additional offices in downtown San Francisco. For more information, please visit http://www.mfoundry.com.
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