The pitch logic of 2020 and 2021 was understandable. Lockdowns had forced behavioural change at scale. People were ordering groceries online, managing health remotely and doing work through apps they'd never heard of a year earlier. Capital was cheap globally, and SA investors and foreign funds pointed money at companies positioned to capture that shift. Some of those bets were right. Many weren't.

The pattern that stands out most clearly isn't about individual companies. It's about what kind of company was being built. The COVID-era South African startups that are thriving today are, overwhelmingly, the ones that sold to other businesses, built infrastructure or embedded themselves into financial systems. The ones that sold directly to consumers on the back of changed behaviour are, broadly, the ones that struggled.

TymeBank raised $179M (approximately R2.9B) across two rounds during the period. It now has 15 million customers, has reached profitability, and closed a $250M (R4.5B) Series D in December 2024 led by Nubank at a $1.5B (R27B) valuation. Yoco, which raised an $83M (R1.4B) Series C, is now processing over $2B (R36B) in annual transactions across 202,000 merchants.

Ozow processed its billionth transaction and more than R5B in transaction value. Stitch, which raised just $6M (R90M) in 2021, came back in 2025 with a $55M (R1B) Series B and has since acquired two payments companies. Onafriq (formerly MFS Africa) raised a $100M (R1.6B) in Series C funding and now has over 700 employees, a Visa partnership, and a PAPSS pilot running across the continent. Jumo raised $175M (approximately R2.8B) across two rounds and was later acquired by Letshego Holdings, having disbursed $8.7B (R156B) to 35 million people.

These are businesses whose value comes from the infrastructure, not from any particular consumer habit.

Compare that to the consumer side. Planet42 raised over $53M (R850M) on the thesis that South Africans would prefer car subscriptions to dealerships. It filed for restructuring in Estonia in August 2024. It still has roughly 25’000 customers in SA, but is down to 42 employees and has been through significant financial difficulty.

Bottles was acquired by Pick n Pay during the delivery hype, and Pick n Pay subsequently ran into its own financial crisis. OneCart was acquired by Massmart. UCOOK, the meal kit delivery company, exited to Silvertree at $12.3M (R220M), a modest return relative to the category noise that surrounded it at the time.

Across industries, the same trend holds: If a company born during COVID relied on consumers continuing behaviours they adopted during the pandemic, sustaining that business became harder as life returned to normal.

Roughly 60% of all COVID-era SA deals were fintech. The winners in that category won very big, but the tail of smaller fintech bets that went nowhere is long. Meanwhile, sectors with genuine long-term opportunity, including agritech, healthtech, and edtech, were underfunded relative to what the data suggests they deserved. We've tracked the state of SA venture capital closely. The heavy concentration in fintech during this period now appears, in hindsight, to have been a structural imbalance rather than a rational allocation of capital.

OVEX raised $4.1M (R65M) from Alameda Research, FTX's trading arm, and FTX subsequently collapsed in one of the largest fraud cases in financial history. NFTfi raised $5M (R80M) from Kleiner Perkins for an NFT lending platform. The NFT market collapsed. Luno was acquired by Digital Currency Group, which later faced serious financial problems through its Genesis subsidiary. Valr, which raised a $3.4M (R55M) Series A, is one of the few crypto-adjacent companies from the period that is still operating and hasn't made news for the wrong reasons.

Around 20 companies from the COVID class were later acquired. Some were clean exits with real returns. Crossfin went to Ethos and ARC for $83M (R1.5B). Ad Dynamo was acquired by Aleph for $30M (R555M). Adumo sold to Lesaka for approximately $96M (R1.7B). Skynamo was acquired by Klipboard. RapidDeploy, the emergency dispatch software company, was acquired by Motorola Solutions in what became a landmark exit for HAVAIC. Several of these founders and companies appear across the Stellenbosch founders we've mapped previously. 

These were genuine outcomes for investors and founders.

Others were harder to read. Bottles, OneCart, and Zoona, which was acquired by Mukuru after years of difficulty, all changed hands in deals with undisclosed terms under circumstances that pointed to a lack of viable alternatives. Several smaller companies were absorbed as acqui-hires, including HelloHR into Finclusion, SwitchPay into Adumo, Selpal into FNB, and Oltio into Ukheshe. The companies were acquired, but it remains uncertain whether investors fully recovered their capital.

Then there's the long tail of companies that are still operating, haven't raised again, and haven't exited. Sendmarc, which raised during the period, has continued to grow and raised further funding since. Mobiz raised a $4M (R65M) pre-Series A and has stayed quiet since. HyperionDev is still running its coding bootcamps. Omnisient, the data collaboration platform, is still operating.

These companies aren't failures, and they aren't successes yet. They're in the difficult middle phase of building a business: past the early validation stage, not yet at the scale that generates external momentum. Some will exit cleanly, some will close, and a few will break through. The ones worth watching are those that have stayed capital-efficient and found genuine revenue, not the ones coasting on 2021 valuations.

The COVID period did produce lasting companies. TymeBank at a $1.5B valuation, Yoco processing $2B a year, Stitch now a serious infrastructure player, the Skynamo and RapidDeploy exits. All of these are real outcomes that strengthen the argument that SA can produce companies worth backing.

But the Naspers Foundry story is worth sitting with separately. Naspers invested during COVID in Aerobotics, Planet42, WhereIsMyTransport, The Student Hub, Food Supply Network, Naked, and Ctrl. The results were mixed at best. Planet42 restructured. Aerobotics is still operating but has 50 employees and hasn't raised funds since 2020. WhereIsMyTransport went quiet.

Naspers eventually closed the Foundry programme entirely. When one of the largest investors on the continent decides a dedicated SA startup fund isn't worth continuing, that's a meaningful signal, not a footnote. It suggests the COVID-era opportunity in SA was real enough to attract institutional capital, but not deep enough, or not structured correctly, to justify a permanent programme around it.

Five years on, the COVID class answers a more useful question than whether SA startups can raise money. They clearly can. The question is whether the capital was deployed with enough discipline to build durable companies. The infrastructure bets held up. The consumer behaviour bets mostly didn't. The crypto bets largely collapsed with the broader market. And the most prominent institutional attempt to systematically back SA startups during the era was wound down.

What's worth noting is that the same fintech concentration is visible in SA's current funding rounds. The VCs funding SA startups today are still overwhelmingly backing payments and financial infrastructure. Whether the next generation of investors and founders has absorbed the lessons of the COVID class, or is repeating the same pattern with larger cheques, is a question worth carrying forward.

This news first appeared in our 14 April edition on Nudg3 AI search visibility in SA.

Read our analysis of South Africa's venture capital landscape and what institutional capital is now looking for. See the map of Stellenbosch founders whose companies feature prominently in this cohort. And for context on where SA VC is heading, see HAVAIC Fund 3 and what its portfolio exits signal about the maturing market.

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