Cape Town: Africa's high-tech hub

While South Africa as a whole has made a name for itself on the start-up scene, Cape Town owes the extraordinary influx of young, innovative entrepreneurs to its exceptional geographical environment and art of living. The city is home to 60 % from all the country's start-upswell ahead of Johannesburg. Once again this year, the city ranked remarkably well in the StartupBlink index, which evaluates the ecosystem of 1,000 cities in around 100 countries, coming in 146th place. This position in a ranking still traditionally dominated by American cities was welcomed by the city's first mayor, Dan Plato. " This can be attributed to a number of factorshe stressed. The City of Cape Town has always made support for small businesses and young entrepreneurs a priority, and to be in this position shows that our efforts have paid off. ".

On the face of it, it wasn't easy to compete with Johannesburg, South Africa's traditional business city, as the country's best high-tech destination. But the last decade has seen Cape Town the emergence of exceptional start-ups which have rocked rival cities. In 2015, the mobile payment app Snapscan was sold to Standard Bank and in 2018, it was the distance learning platform Get Smarter that took off on the markets for $103 million. Cape Town's high-tech legend was born.

Incubators and coworking

Its origins lie in a delicate combination of funding, support and incubation. The creation in 1998 of the Cape Innovation and Technology Inititative (CiTi) and the launch in 2009 of Bandwidth Barn Woodtsock - funded by the South African state and the continent's oldest incubator - marked a real turning point. In 2009, when GetSmarter had just started up and still only had six employees, Clickatell, a Cape Town start-up specialising in mobile messaging, was launched. recruited by the US State Department to send extracts of US President Barrack Obama's speeches to Cairo and Accra. The following year, Silicon Cape, a second incubator, was founded by two entrepreneurs to support the growing number of local start-ups. Sumarie Roodt, President of Silicon Cape, likes to say that " Cape Town offers a formidable base for pan-African collaboration ".

Today, there are more than 500 start-ups in Cape Town's high-tech eco-system: 20% of them specialise in e-commerce and 15% in fintech. This is logical, given that cash is gradually losing its importance in transactions in Africa's major cities and that rural populations are under-banked. The mobile money solutions are particularly popular with consumers and investors alike. Compared to other African high-tech centres such as Nairobi and LagosAt least a third of them are backed by business angels or investors, whether private or institutional, such as France's Proparco. There also seems to be more dynamism in Cape Town, where 3% of start-ups have more than a hundred employees. The sector contributes more than 12,500 jobs, the equivalent of Lagos with more than twice as many companies.

Training and code

This explains the constant influx of young entrepreneurs and the multiplication of structures to welcome them, all of which is a source of great satisfaction. ranging from traditional incubators to more specialised formulas and accelerators. The Cape Innovation and Technology Initiative continues to run two Bandwidth Barn incubators, one of which is still located in the famous Woodtstock Exchange building and offers three-month programmes for women entrepreneurs, six-month internships for project leaders and two-day to three-year development programme sessions.

The more specialised Grindstone Accelerator helps start-ups move towards sustainability and become attractive to investorsGSB Solutions, created in 2014 at the University of Cape Town, focuses on start-ups and RLabs, a social impact accelerator, on rebuilding marginalised communities. This incubator co-founds up to five start-ups a year through its financing instrument, Venture Garage. There are also a host of coworking spaces, the largest of which, Workshop 17, is also an arts and crafts market.

In a city where entrepreneurs complain more about access to talent than to capital, training plays an essential role with initiatives such as Code X, which trains programmers in one yearor Code for Cape Town, which has propelled 200 young women to high-level professional positions in information technology.

Creativity, innovation, inspiration, mountains, ocean and nature: this is the cocktail that gives Cape Town hope of winning out over Africa's high-tech competition. And Covid isn't going to change that, if a young local entrepreneur is to be believed: "Nobody goes to the office on the same day. Instead, a lot of people work from cafés overlooking the bay". Teleworking before its time...