We featured Skynamo and interviewed founder Sam Clarke on our podcast before any exit was on the table. Now, 14 years after founding the company as Honeybee in Technopark, Stellenbosch, Clarke has sold it to a global platform company. It's another data point in the Stellenbosch founders pattern we mapped last week — and it won't be the last.

Skynamo is a mobile-first, cloud-based platform that connects field sales teams to back-office systems. If you're a wholesaler or distributor with reps on the road visiting customers, Skynamo is the tool that lets those reps plan visits, place orders, check stock and pricing, and feed data back to the ERP in real time.

The numbers: approximately 1,000 customers across Africa, the United States, and Europe. More than $70 million in monthly order value flows through the platform. Millions of customer interactions processed per year. All built in Stellenbosch.

We wrote about how Skynamo approached sales optimisation tech before this deal happened. The core insight was that field sales in wholesale and distribution are still largely analogue in most markets, and the company that digitises it becomes embedded in the customer's operations in a way that's very hard to rip out.

That stickiness is exactly what makes a company like Skynamo attractive to an acquirer.

Klipboard (formerly Kerridge Commercial Systems) is a vertical ERP provider — meaning it builds industry-specific business management software for wholesale distribution, manufacturing, rental, and retail. The company has 55,000 customers across 74 countries, 1,700 employees, and offices in the UK, Europe, the US, South Africa and Australia.

For Klipboard, field sales is a gap in their stack. Their customers already run Klipboard's ERP for inventory, finance, and warehousing. Skynamo adds the missing layer: what happens when the sales rep is in the field, in front of the customer. Klipboard CEO Ian Bendelow said the acquisition strengthens the company's position in Sub-Saharan Africa and globally.

For Skynamo, the deal gives Clarke's platform access to 55,000 potential customers who already run the ERP systems that Skynamo integrates with. Its distribution is at a scale that would take years to build organically.

We sat down with Sam Clarke on our podcast before this exit landed. He talks through the 14-year journey of building a B2B SaaS company from Stellenbosch — the early Honeybee days, the pivot to field sales, and what it takes to scale enterprise software out of South Africa into the US and Europe.

Now that the acquisition has happened, the conversation hits differently. Watch it here: Our interview with Skynamo founder Sam Clarke →

This is the second major acquisition story we've covered this week. Woolworths bought In2food, its R5 billion-a-year prepared foods supplier. Klipboard bought Skynamo. Both deals share a common mechanic: the acquired company became so embedded in its customer's operations that the customer (or a platform serving that customer) decided ownership was better than partnership.

For Stellenbosch specifically, the exit pattern is evolving. The earlier generation (Ad Dynamo, Conversio) built and sold. The current generation (Ukheshe, Simera Sense) is building to scale. Skynamo sits in between: 14 years of building, deep product-market fit, and an acquirer that wants the technology and the customer base. It's the kind of outcome that funds the next wave.

This news first appeared in our 19 March ‘26 newsletter on MyPetFriends pet-sitter finder.

Read our original feature on Skynamo's sales optimisation tech. See the full map of Stellenbosch founders who raised R100M+. And learn how two founders sold a startup to Massmart in three years, in how to sell a startup.

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