When we first wrote about Wunderpar, the pitch was simple: golfers earn tokens for playing rounds, courses get more traffic, and brands get an engaged audience. At the time, the company had logged 67,000 rounds on the app and onboarded Callaway as a partner. We said we were watching the space.

Here's what happened next.

SA co-founder Geran de Klerk (CTO, previously worked with the NBA and Virgin Mobile) built the original Wunderpar tech. The model — reward people for engaging with sport — turned out to have legs well beyond golf.

De Klerk teamed up with Blake Patterson (CEO) and Michael Testa (COO, ex-AMC and FanDuel) to build Wunderfan: an all-in-one sports loyalty app where fans earn "Wundercoins" for attending games, watching live sport, making predictions, and engaging with content. 

Attend-to-earn, watch-to-earn, scroll-to-earn. The coins convert to real rewards: merchandise, gift cards, tickets, and experiences.

The company set up in Birmingham, Alabama's Innovation Depot, and the traction came fast. Wunderfan went viral on the University of Oregon campus during football season. At Mountain Brook High School, 72% of the student body (more than 700 students) were actively using the app on a single game day. The campus ambassador program was acquiring users at under $1 per install.

That caught the attention of ESPN Events, which named Wunderfan the official fan rewards app for the JLAB Birmingham Bowl. The Southern Professional Hockey League's Birmingham Bulls followed. Fox Business ran a segment on the platform, with Testa laying out the vision to become the sports engagement equivalent of Robinhood.

In February, Wunderfan closed a $3.1 million round led by Sororibus Capital — the company's first institutional raise after being entirely bootstrapped.

This isn't an ambassador deal. Steyn is putting money in.

Dale Steyn is widely regarded as the greatest fast bowler of the modern era: 439 Test wickets, ICC Test Player of the Year 2008, and number one in the ICC Test rankings for a record 263 weeks. Since retiring, he's coached in the IPL (Sunrisers Hyderabad), SA20 (Sunrisers Eastern Cape, two titles), and Major League Cricket (Washington Freedom). He has 2 million Instagram followers and deep relationships across every major T20 league.

For Wunderfan, Steyn's investment and involvement aren't about his face on a poster. It's about cricket as a market. The IPL alone is valued at over $16 billion. India has 500 million-plus cricket fans. T20 leagues are proliferating globally — SA20, The Hundred, Major League Cricket, and the Caribbean Premier League. Each of those leagues needs fan engagement tools. Steyn's network gives Wunderfan a direct line into that ecosystem.

For Steyn, the move signals a deliberate shift from coaching roles and traditional brand ambassador deals (he's previously fronted Fun88 and Parimatch) into equity positions in sports technology. Investing in the platform rather than just endorsing it is a different kind of bet.

Geran de Klerk built the technology in South Africa, tested the engagement model with golf, then took it to the US and proved it at scale with American sports. Now, through Steyn, the product is circling back toward cricket — a sport where South Africa and its diaspora have outsized influence.

It's a pattern we've seen across the Stellenbosch founders ecosystem and in stories like how SA founders scale to the US: build the tech locally, prove the model internationally, then use SA networks to unlock new markets. De Klerk is doing it with sports engagement tech. The cricket expansion, backed by one of the most connected people in world cricket, is the next test.

Geran is also a member of The Founder Collab, our community of 130+ SA founders who work together to build great businesses from South Africa. If you're building something and want access to the kind of network, masterclasses, and founder-to-founder support that helps companies go from local to global, come build with founders like Geran in the Collab.

This news first appeared in our 23 March ‘26 newsletter on FitSorted WhatsApp calorie tracker.

Read our original feature on Wunderpar's golf-to-earn model. See how SA founders are building globally in how to scale from SA to the US. And explore the network producing SA's biggest tech exits in Stellenbosch founders.

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