The fin crime specialist dropping SA business costs, the engineer keeping municipalities on their toes and the civic innovation consultant boosting SA fashion's game. These are the SA founders we featured in May 2026.

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Cape Town's Justin Zondagh, a UCT MBA who spent years at Mweb and Skype before turning his attention to home security, found his original spark on a road trip. While staying at a guesthouse outside Colesberg en route to Joburg, the owner told him she regularly hosts Cape Town guests who arrive, spend the night, then turn around and drive home to switch off their alarm. Justin and his four co-founders built Olarm to fix that. The platform now connects to every major SA alarm brand and works with 900+ installers, with a 75-person team, manufacturing in Cape Town and expansion into the UK and Italy. See how Justin and team are working to make SA's R8bn alarm sector smarter.

Andrew Mori spent 20 years running engineering teams, including 8 years as CEO of Deimos, the bootstrapped cloud consultancy he built into a Financial Times Africa's Fastest-Growing Companies list member for three years running. Working with SA's top companies there, he kept watching the same pattern: businesses that weren't tech companies spending years and millions rolling their own internal DevOps platforms while their best engineers got poached for remote gigs. Salus Cloud was born from that frustration, closed a $3.7 million seed round co-led by Atlantica Ventures and P1 Ventures last year, and is already live with enterprise FinTech and e-commerce clients. See how Andrew built Salus Cloud's DevOps platform.

Cape Town's Nick Allen, a civil engineer who spent his early career doing IT at the UK's NHS before returning to SA for an MBA at UCT Graduate School of Business and an exchange to Chicago Booth, founded Savant in 2004 after a stint at life sciences incubator Acorn. Twenty-one years on, Savant has backed 70+ ventures (Leatt now does $76 million a year with 115 staff, AI Diagnostics just raised R85 million), helped raise R200 million in capital and generated R3.5 billion in portfolio revenue. African deep-tech hardware founders with product and traction can now apply to Cohort 4 of the Savant Build Programme.

Also, see how to secure R1.6 million funded venture building with Savant’s Build Cohort 4.

Capetonian Murray Turner, a 13-year digital marketing operator and lifelong learner who studies everything from human psychology to skyscraper engineering through MIT, Harvard, Oxford, Yale, LSE and the Global Reinvention Academy, hit a wall. While on burnout leave, settling a deceased family member's estate and watching three final-round job offers collapse in a row, he stood at the edge of the Zambezi wondering why life felt this hard. The thought that came to him: maybe chasing your goals only feels hard when you're chasing the wrong things. That insight became Antistable, a diagnostic platform measuring where strain is building inside organisations. See how Murray built Antistable for organisational resilience.

Joburg's Nkosinathi Temba, an Amandasig Secondary School alum who started building tech at age 14 and recently won the 2025 Nedbank YouthX Award, watched his younger brother almost give up on maths because no one ever recognised his effort. So he built Thuto, a learning app that converts academic work into real money via Thuto Coins (one coin equals R1). The stat that surprised the Thuto team most: in a 320-student pilot, 70% of learners chose to save their coins rather than spend them. Assessment scores rose 14.5% over two terms. See how Nkosinathi built Thuto, the edtech app that pays students.

UJ BCom Honours grad Roché Pretorius, a Joburg-based financial crime specialist who'd built compliance systems for the likes of Louis Dreyfus, watched a system he'd developed for a client get ripped out and replaced by a European platform costing R20 million a year. With SA having just exited the FATF grey list and the FSCA already passing R943 million in penalties annually, he knew the small operators couldn't keep pricing in the risk of not screening at all. So he, COO Sybil Doms Pretorius and team bootstrapped a local AML platform that drops screening costs by 88.8%. See how Roché built RAHN Monitor's sanction screening.

23-year-old UKZN mechanical engineering student Keyuren Maharaj, former chair of the Glenwood Ratepayers Association, got so fed up with eThekwini ignoring service delivery reports that he taught himself to code, wrote hundreds of thousands of lines himself, and patented what he built. CityMenderSA went live in July 2025. The city flatly ignored every alert the platform sent through, but Keyuren kept at it, and Durban now responds to roughly 90% of issues. With 11,000 users, 15 million data points gathered in 8 months and operations across all 200 SA municipalities, see how Keyuren built CityMenderSA's municipal accountability platform.

Zimbabwean civic innovation consultant Chiyedza Chinake, a social work grad from the University of Zimbabwe with a Master of Nonprofit and Public Administration from Notre Dame, spent five years in applied research and nonprofit work before pivoting hard into AI fashion tech. She met advisor Simba Mubvuma at Notre Dame, where they won a graduate case competition together, and built Fashion Labs around one question: how to reduce the time to live for fashion and beauty brands. In an industry where a single shoot can cost R500k a day, brands can now flat-lay a thousand SKUs and go live within a week with Fashion Labs' visual production.

Doing his articles in Cape Town's Southern Suburbs, Kabelo Ntsoane watched colleagues drowning under the weight of working, studying and family. So he taught himself to code through Udemy and Codecademy, and built a simple prototype on his own. In the early days he ran Facebook ads, tutored in the evenings, and answered WhatsApps from UNISA students looking for help, all by himself. With SA short of 20,000 CAs and the SAICA pass rate sitting at just 39%, CA-Live is now four people strong with nearly 2,000 students and 63 tutors. See how Kabelo built CA-Live for SA's accounting study journey.

Cape Town's Chris Immelman and UCT Data Science MSc Kieran Donnelly, formerly of ExploreAI and Sand Technologies, are leading the first formal spin-out of Ubundi, the AI-centric venture studio founded by Adii Pienaar (of WooCommerce fame). Their venture, Kwanda, exists because they kept watching SA companies try to bolt together pre-built AI tools and end up with sprawling, fragile setups that never made it into production. Instead, Kwanda builds the custom AI infrastructure layer underneath the agents, with clients now returning across VC, events, procurement, engineering and legal. See how Chris and Kieran built Kwanda for SA's AI enablement.

Joburg's Siphiwe Moteane spent nearly two decades working across SA's financial sector, with stints at FNB, Capitec, Sasfin, Adumo, and now Discovery, so she knows exactly how banks price home loans and how rarely they pass on improvements to loyal clients. With SA's prime rate now at 10.25% (down from 2024's 11.75%), older bonds without interest-linking are leaving homeowners paying more than they need to on R1.65 million properties. Siphiwe built Clxr, a free 60-second tool that tells you whether you qualify for a rate review and auto-generates the email to your bank with your numbers in. See how Siphiwe built Clxr's bond rate reviewer.

Joburg's Lynton Naicker, a UKZN graduate whose previous venture, Snapslip (a digital receipting startup), went through Startupbootcamp and earned a spot at UK Africa Investment Week, found his next idea closer to home. A lawyer friend had become so estranged through long billable hours that they never made it to a beer or a rugby match anymore. So Lynton built a basic document repository with a conversational assistant on top, just to give his friend some time back. It worked so well that 18 months of R&D followed, and when a senior attorney won a high court case using it, Anvaya was born. See how a missed beer became Anvaya's legal AI.

Cape Town's Agmad Kafaar, a CPUT graduate who also built MosaicBox (a browser-based photo mosaic tool), spent his days watching his wife and co-founder Aalia Ganie grind through painful, repetitive admin at her tourism job: hunting through folders for old rate cards, manually typing supplier rates into spreadsheets. The international software that could fix it was Australian-made and priced for enterprise use, so most SA operators kept doing it by hand. Three painful pivots later (B2C builders will feel that), Agmad and Aalia landed on TourBiddy: a rate management and quoting platform purpose-built for SA tour operators. See how they built TourBiddy's travel rate management.

Pretoria's Reghardt Pretorius, a Stellenbosch mechatronics engineer who previously worked at Optix Africa and Discovery, kept watching his uncle, an agricultural advisor in Germany, capture every farm visit in a dedicated brown folder of handwritten notes. Three clients a day, Monday to Thursday, Fridays reserved for taking calls, and decades of hard-won institutional memory living in one head. So Reghardt teamed up with US-based Mark Donne, who runs an almond, macadamia and tree fruit advisory firm in California and a farmland management company across 25 US states. Together, they built PropelMapper, with trials now running at Cornell University. See how they built PropelMapper's agri advisor OS.

The Innovation City Startup of the Year 2026 competition took place in May 2026, in association with The Open Letter. And you can see all the founders of the 2026 Startup of the Year finalists here and discover the ultimate winner, the founders who became your 2026 Startup of the Year winners.

We update this page at the end of each month, but we showcase a new SA founder and their company every single day in The Open Letter, along with loads of daily tech, investment and AI news. Be the first to know every day by signing up to The Open Letter now.

Every week, we interview South African founders and operators building or scaling unique new businesses of every size. This is the monthly archive for May 2026, capturing the founders who moved through our weekly watch list during the month.

If you know of an SA founder (be it of a startup, scale-up or SME) that should be featured here, tell our team about it.

Also, see the latest on the live SA founders to watch this week. Or jump across to SA companies to watch in May 2026.

Plus, see how to write an investor update newsletter that gets you funded and how to win big in Nedbank’s Business Ignite competition.

Get more SA tech and business news.