The Leadership
Meet the Directors
More than four decades of combined experience across insurance, venture capital, fintech, and ICT — backed by deep expertise in SaaS, cybersecurity, data protection, cloud, and AI — united by a single mission: helping African startups go from idea to exit.
Henri Zietsman
Director — VC / Fintech (ex-AWS, Snr Investor Manager)
Henri worked across 23 countries in Africa, building Telcos, Payment Infrastructure, and even launching Mobile TV. Founded an AgriFin startup and maintains active relationships with the majority of investors on the continent.
Henri is passionate about emerging markets and open to helping any founder navigate the African startup and investment landscape — from first pitch to Series B and beyond.
Louis van Wyk
Director — Insurance (ex-MiWay)
Strategic CTO with 17+ years of Insurance Industry expertise and a 35-year IT career. Louis was one of the start-up employees when MiWay started as a business idea in 2008. He was involved in the early stages of the MiWay start-up and over the past 17 years, MiWay grew from a start-up to a very profitable business and remains one of the leading Insurance companies in South Africa. Louis bridges complex technical infrastructure and measurable business growth — transforming technology from a cost centre into a high-performance engine for digital innovation.
With deep expertise in the unique regulatory and technical demands of the insurance landscape, he ensures cyber resilience, seamless system interoperability, and IT governance that supports a competitive edge. Key strengths include sector-deep Insurance & Fintech leadership, aligning IT roadmaps with board-level objectives, advanced cyber security defence, and operational ROI optimisation.
Leelen Pillay
Director — ICT (Rain Telecom, Tauspace)
An African, socialist, entrepreneur, animal lover, and self-proclaimed technology geek. Leelen brings hands-on ICT leadership from Rain Telecom and Tauspace, with a grounded, people-first philosophy that drives real-world impact across the continent.
Christo Zietsman
Director — SaaS (CyberSentriq)
Christo has spent 20 years building software in domains where failure has real consequences: mine seismology, enterprise backup, cybersecurity.
He knows what it takes to get from a working prototype to a system other people depend on. His work has ranged from kernel drivers and distributed backup clients to product definition and engineering leadership. At CyberSentriq, he shapes platform architecture and developer tooling, and has been pushing AI-assisted workflows into the team's daily engineering practice. He works mostly with startups that have proven an idea and need to build for scale. The architecture, the delivery process, the engineering culture that lets a product grow without being rewritten every 18 months.