Improving our everyday life and our impact
Backing local, building globally, forging long-term partnerships
'At heart, we are entrepreneurs who want to make a positive impact on the world.'
- Koos Bekker, chair
We know that good ideas can be found all over the world, so we search globally for local entrepreneurs using technology to make everyday life better for the people and communities they understand best. We believe people's everyday needs are often universal and our global reach means we can spot opportunities for local companies we partner with to fast-track their expansion to other markets.
Investing and operating in around 80 countries enables us to facilitate global collaboration and share ideas between our partner companies. Our global perspective is reinforced with teams on the ground in all our key regions: Latin America, Asia and Europe.
We build long-term partnerships with the companies we invest in, to help them reach their potential and to create the most value for our stakeholders. We pick our partners carefully and spend a lot of time and energy making sure we're right for each other. When we decide to invest, we do so strategically and energetically – bringing much more than just money to the companies we invest in. Our partnership approach fosters long-term relationships and responsible growth. We have a long horizon for our investments: we invest off our balance sheet rather than via a fund, so we are not limited by exit deadlines and we are not short-term profit seekers.
We have the financial capacity to invest across the life cycle of the companies we partner with, so we can fully support them from early stage through to maturity and scale. We are disciplined in how we allocate capital and we do so based on growth plans and progress against those plans which we review together regularly.
We work in partnership with our founders and their teams, providing advice and expert resources to help them successfully scale their business for long-term growth. All our partner companies have access to the wider group resources and teams with expertise in key areas such as AI, talent acquisition, intellectual property (IP) protection, legal and regulatory matters, finance, communications and product marketing.