💸 SA's Biggest Startup Exits of 2025
It’s New Year's Eve, and as we reflect on the year that was, we can’t help but feel excited for what’s to come in 2025.
SA’s business confidence reached the highest levels it’s been in 9 years, several local startups got sold for large sums (more on this later), and we learnt that there are way more South African people building awesome startups than we ever imagined! ICYMI, we covered over 100 SA startups this year, which you can read here.
To celebrate the year that was, we are reflecting on four major startup deals that happened in 2024.
Happy New Year everyone! 🎉
HR TECH GEARING FOR AN IPO
Payspace Sold in March 2024
In 2007, brothers Bruce, Clyde, Warren van Wyk, and George Karageorgiades started PaySpace, a cloud-based payroll platform that streamlined the laborious processes and systems involved in payroll. They had amazing success early on, expanding to 11 countries within the first three years.
By 2022, this number reached 43, with more than 11’000 customers using its software. Unsurprisingly, they caught the attention of global HR software giant Deel. Deel is no small company, having organically grown to $500m in annual recurring revenue (outside of acquisitions) and aiming for a listing in 2025/2026.
In March this year, Deel bought Payspace for an undisclosed amount – putting HR tech coming out of SA on the map for sure.
Payspace founders.
Some SA startups are also building world-class HR products. ICYMI We covered some of them this year:
- Wamly, a candidate screening tool for hiring.
- Jem, a comprehensive HR solution for deskless workforce.
- Ollie, an AI mental health assistant for your workforce.
CONSOLIDATING THE SA PAYMENTS SPACE
Adumo Sold for R1.59bn in May 2024
There has been a lot of interest in SA payment companies in the last few years. Payfast (and consolidated group of companies) was acquired by Middle-Eastern bank, Network, for R3.5bn, and now, in October 2024, Adumo, SA’s largest independent payments platform, was acquired by local listed entity Lesaka Technologies for $85.9 million.
Adumo was founded in 2019. In that year, it merged several payment providers, including SureSwipe (founded in 2008 by Paul Kent), after receiving investment from Crossfin, among others.
Lesaka has made several powerful acquisitions in South Africa's payments space, including Kazang, one of the country’s largest spaza shop point of sale and payment solutions; EasyPay, the country’s largest bill payment platform; and now Adumo. These acquisitions have combined to give Lesaka more than 1.7 million customers annually and make it a major player to watch in this space in 2025.
Paul Kent, Founder of Adumo
ICYMI Fintech has always been a hot topic, and we have been covering a few of them this year…
- Kazang, an innovative point of sale and payment solution for the informal market.
- We had Anton Gaylard from Crossfin on our podcast.
- Stokfella is a Lesaka-backed Stokvel management platform that we wrote about here.
EVENTS MAKING A COMEBACK
Quicket Sold to Ticketmaster in July 2024
Ticketmaster, a global event ticketing platform that generates ±$3 billion a year and operates in 35 countries worldwide, expanded to South Africa in 2022.
Since its launch in SA, Ticketmaster has sold tickets to various large events, but the one that caught our attention was a rugby test match between SA and NZ at Cape Town Stadium. Using big data processes, Ticketmaster secured interest for some 240,000 tickets. With only 60,000 tickets available, the price per ticket could be optimised to ensure a more lucrative return for the hosts—a process similar to how airline tickets change in price based on demand.
But Ticketmaster's big play in South Africa was acquiring Quicket, a local ticketing platform, in July. Quicket was founded in 2011 by James Tagg, Mike Kennedy, and James Hedley, receiving funding from Knife along the way. It has become the go-to platform for most events in South Africa. This deal will not only give Ticketmaster access to a larger events base in South Africa, but we have no doubt that Quicket will bring with it vast experience in the small- to medium-sized events space.
Quicket Founders
ICYMI Speaking SA startups in the events space, we covered one doing something interesting…
- Ohkayi, a platform to host recordings of events and sell access to them digitally
A GLOBAL ANALYTICS PLAY FROM SA
Syft Sold to Xero for R1.3bn in September 2024
In 2016, Syft’s founders, Vangelis Kyriazis, Eleftherios Kyriazis, Duran Hamer, and Matt Stephanou, were creating custom reports for accounting practice clients. However, they soon realised that these reports could be replicated for different clients, and Syft was born.
Today, Syft Analytics is an AI-first financial reporting platform that consolidates data across multiple data tools (think accounting, CRM, transactions, and others) to provide a single view of everything in your data ecosystem. Their growth has been impressive, and they have truly become a global company that serves more than 50,000 customers across 50 countries.
One of the places where Syft gained major traction was on the Xero apps marketplace, where users discovered it and loved their treatment of data and dashboards, to the point where the product blew up within Xero’s own user base. Not one to let an opportunity go, Xero itself purchased Syft in September 2024 for a massive $70m.
ICYMI, We wrote about Syft Analytics earlier this year.
OVER TO YOU
Looking Ahead to 2025…
AI will undoubtedly feature in every category of product being built in 2025 and will also significantly impact the rate of product development, mostly by speeding up software development.
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