About Swazi Ventures

About Swazi Ventures

Swazi Ventures is dedicated to growing high-potential Swazi businesses that are addressing some of the most pressing challenges and capturing the most promising opportunities in the country. We are a social enterprise that is looking to fill the funding and strategy gaps in the early-stage in order to make entrepreneurship more accessible and more successful. We want to energize small and growing businesses to generate livelihood opportunities in communities while providing market-based solutions to social challenges.

Who We Work With

Our process is highly selective; we look for opportunities where our capital and advice are catalytic and crucial to launch or take a business to the next level. Successful entrepreneurs will have a strong and motivated management team, a track record of success, strong revenue growth or a very clear path to revenue, a solid business model with sustainable revenue streams, and a product or service that is serving a large, growing market, among many other attributes.

What We Do

Funding

Swazi Ventures is pioneering small-scale venture financing to provide much needed funding to the start-up and SME space in Swaziland. We work with entrepreneurs in the early stage, where most of the growth still lies ahead. Access to the right kind of finance is still an uphill climb for many Swazi entrepreneurs, especially those that are at an inflection point: either looking to convert a brilliant idea into a thriving business or a 2 person bootstrapped operation into a 20 person sustainable business. We are here for that.

Mentoring and Networking

The entrepreneurs we work with have access to an expansive network of experienced industry leaders and like-minded fellow entrepreneurs. By sharing lessons learned among each other and learning from the experiences of successful business leaders, our entrepreneurs distill and implement best practices.

Advising

We provide strategic advisory support to the entrepreneurs that we work with in order to place them on a strong path to success. Our team draws from deep and diverse management consulting experience advising the executive leadership of global organizations, including investors, social enterprises, governments, foundations, and corporations, across different countries, including the United States, Peru, Kenya, Tanzania, Nigeria, South Africa, and Swaziland.

Our Team

about

Thembumenzi Kunene

Co-Founder

Thembumenzi is a capital markets financial analyst, based in Mbabane. He specializes in the analysis of financial information, assessment of accounting and economic performances of companies, preparation of statistical reports and assessment of trends, measurement of financial risk of investments, and consumer protection and education. He holds a honours degree in economic science with an undergraduate background in mathematical sciences from Wits University. Thembumenzi is currently studying towards a Masters of management in finance and investments (financial engineering stream) at Wits business school.

Thabo Matse

Co-Founder

Thabo is a strategy consultant with two years of strategic advisory experience in New York City, Johannesburg, and Dar es Salaam. He advises the leadership of governments, foundations, NGOs, corporations, and investors on strategic issues related to investing in livelihoods in emerging and frontier markets. His experience spans a variety of sectors, including renewable energy, agriculture and food security, global health, and private equity, offering a range of support, including organizational strategy design, capacity building, due diligence, monitoring and evaluation, and strategic vision-setting. He holds a double bachelor’s degree in Engineering Sciences and Economics from Dartmouth College, and a business bridge certificate from the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth.

Sibusiso Ngobese

Co-Founder

Sibusiso Ngobese is a software engineer based in Minneapolis, Minnesota. He is a code enthusiast, who works in Windows desktop applications development and full-stack web development (both front-end and back-end), with experience in C#, Java, MySQL, Groovy, Django, JavaScript, HTML, and CSS3. He holds a bachelor’s degree in Computer Science from Macalester College.