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 5 SA founders to watch this week.

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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.

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Every week, we interview South African founders and operators building or scaling unique new businesses of every size. This is a rolling list of the founders behind those companies, and we keep it updated, practically daily.

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