SA hiring tech startup Wamly has closed its Series A, co-led by Hlayisani Capital and Knife Capital. Founder and CEO Francois de Wet confirmed the news in a LinkedIn announcement, with Brett Commaille (Knife Capital) and Mat Palin (Hlayisani Capital) joining as partners on the deal.
Wamly says the round will fund deeper product work, AI integration across the hiring stack, geographic expansion, and additional hiring. The deal size was not disclosed, in keeping with Knife Capital's standing policy on portfolio companies.
Interesting insights on the Wamly Series A raise
This is the third Knife Capital round into Wamly. Knife first backed the company in 2022 when it was a single-product, one-way video interview tool, then participated in a follow-on.
Hlayisani is the new lead, almost certainly deploying from HVF II, the R500m Series A-focused SA fund that initially closed in March 2026 with the Public Investment Corporation and SA SME Fund as anchors. HVF II writes R30m to R70m equity cheques, and Wamly fits the thesis: vertical AI-meets-SaaS sitting at SA's Series A gap.
Since we last profiled Wamly in April, the company has expanded from a single video interview module into a six-module hiring suite covering applicant tracking, skills testing, video interviews, psychometrics, background checks and a candidate portal. The team grew from 7 to 32, ARR is up nearly 70% year-on-year, and the platform now serves candidates across 147 countries.
Two SA funds are backing SA hiring, and that matters
Wamly won Innovation City's Startup of the Year in 2023. Three years later, they have a Series A co-led by two of SA's most respected funds, a six-module product, and 500,000 candidates pulled through Wamly Jobs in the portal's first month after February's launch. That arc is unusually compressed for SA tech.
Most companies need five to seven years to traverse the same distance, if they make it. The bet now is the same one Francois de Wet has been making since 2018: SA can build the hiring infrastructure the country actually needs, not the watered-down version that international tools default to.
Two SA funds writing the cheque rather than offshore capital is the cleanest possible signal that the local market believes the same thing.
You might also like our prior Wamly hiring solutions profile, the SA exits 2024 roundup of where SA companies are landing, and the SA startups story on three local wins.
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