South African Startup Investing In Livestock Among Three Fin-Tech Firms That Have Landed An Investment Deal

Livestock Wealth, a crowdfarmingTM company that allows people to invest in livestock and earn from the sale of the offspring is among three startups that have received investment from AlphaCode, Rand Merchant Investment Holdings (RMI)’s investment vehicle.

The Johannesburg based startup was founded in April of 2015 and has so far had over 2000 cows at various partner-farms valued at ZAR 40 Mn.

Livestock Wealth, Zande Africa, Bright On Capital all received ZAR 23 Mn development loans from the investment company.

“We have granted Zande and Bright On, with whom we’ve been associated for over four years, around ZAR 10 Mn in supplier development loans each and Livestock Wealth has been granted ZAR 2 Mn,” said Dominique Collett, head of AlphaCode.

Founded in 2016, Zande Africa provides trade and merchant finance to spaza shops to enable stock purchases. Currently, it has a turnover of ZAR 17 Mn with 71 staff.

Siya Ntutela the co-founder of the company said the loan will be used to improve the firm’s technology platform as well as aid the company in setting up its third depot.

Livestock Wealth, CEO, Ntuthuko Shezi revealed that the investment will be channeled to build the team. “We have been part of AlphaCode since 2015 when we won R500 000 at a pitch evening. At that stage, we only had 26 customers. We have grown to over a thousand customers. Our platform has grown to become a dependable supplier to large off-takers such as Woolworths.”

Bright On Capital is a peer-to-peer online enterprise-lending platform, serving as an online market place allowing SMEs to raise working capital with ease from traditional and non-traditional lenders.

The firm has partnered with a number of South African corporates, government and other large enterprises to provide their SME suppliers with the ability to raise working capital. It has grown its SME lending book beyond ZAR 25 Mn and expects the lending book to exceed ZAR 50 Mn by early 2020.

Koena Headbush, a co-founder of the platform said the loan will be channeled to grow the platform’s SME lending book, to develop distribution channels and to grow market reach.

The head of Alpha code noted that these type of businesses hardly get the funding they need adding that “as part of our commitment to partner and grow financial services startups, we’ve leveraged our supplier development spending to support them.”

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