More than just Nasa call home with SA start-up

When Nasa wanted to phone home from outer space, the company it chose to help make the call was Snapt, a start-up from Johannesburg backed by billionaires Johann Rupert and Nicky Oppenheimer.

Snapt founder Dave Blakey was just 14 when, together with his father, he started a computer company that developed hardware to manage bandwidth. Now his company Snapt helps manage computer traffic, balance loads among servers and accelerate web flow – but in software format.

With offices in London, Cape Town, Johannesburg and more recently in San Jose, California, Snapt is one of several venture capital success stories from SA.

South Africa had R4.39 billion invested in 532 venture capital deals in 2017, according to the Southern Africa Venture Capital and Private Equity Association.

The UK’s amount was about £5 billion (R91.7 billion) last year, according to Beauhurst.

US venture capital investing hit a record $130.9 billion (R1.8 trillion) in 2018, according to the Pitchbook-National Venture Capital Association Monitor.

Snapt counts some of the world’s largest banks and e-commerce sites as its customers, where every tenth of a second that it takes a web page to load can cost billions a year in lost revenue, the founder said. It will be targeting as much as R212.4 million as it forages in Silicon Valley, an alien terrain to South Africa that Blakey calls “expensive and cut-throat”.

4Di Capital first invested in Snapt in 2011, 4Di co-founder Anton van Vlaanderen said.

“Knowing that many software platforms were moving onto the cloud, we saw a considerable global opportunity for a business like Snapt.”

The fund aims to “use South Africa as a test market for a business and then enable companies to globalise from here” using 4Di’s US office and global networks as levers.

“Snapt fitted this mandate perfectly….”

Other investors in a recent fund-raising round of R42.3 million include Convergence Partners, Sanari Capital and Nedbank, said Blakey.

“It turns out you can be South African and sell mission-critical equipment to the US government and it doesn’t matter we’re from South Africa,” said Blakey. “It made us think how much we should value ourselves.”