Every so often, someone reaches out to ask how our event curation works and can they put their name forward as a potential speaker. They’d been following Innovation City for a while. They’ve attended an event or two. They’ve built something interesting, or formed a strong...
Inside Innovation City, we spend a lot of time with founders making real decisions: Where to build. Where to hire. Where to keep capital, or move it. As we head into 2026, one question keeps surfacing in conversations across our community: Does South Africa still make sense as a place...
Most startup legal problems don’t start as legal problems. They start as misaligned expectations between co-founders, informal decisions made under pressure, or assumptions that “we’ll sort it out later.” By the time lawyers are brought in, those early choices are often expensive or impossible to...
If there was one defining feature of 2025 inside Innovation City, it wasn’t noise or hype; it was follow-through. Across fintech, AI, proptech, marketplaces, infrastructure and services, our members didn’t just talk about what they were building. They launched. They partnered. They expanded. They raised. They...
Bersella Advisors is one of the newest additions to the Innovation City community, bringing a fresh approach to financial advice for founders, scale-ups, and fast-growing companies. Led by Co-Founder & CEO Luca Bersella, the firm blends traditional financial expertise with AI-driven advisory models designed specifically...
For more than a decade, Luuk Winkens has worked in fintech, helping companies scale across African markets through better financial infrastructure. Today, as Head of Growth at NjiaPay, he leads the commercial strategy behind a platform designed to simplify and optimise online payments for South...
At Innovation City, we talk to founders every day who are in different stages of the build. Some are sprinting. Some are scaling. Some are exiting. And all of them eventually hit the same moment: “Okay… but what do I do with my life and...
The Swedish Consulate has joined the Innovation City community, deepening the growing connection between South Africa’s innovation ecosystem and Sweden’s global business and technology networks. Representing the Consulate is Carl Fredrik Sammeli, Honorary Consul of Sweden in Cape Town and long-time Innovation City member through...
If challenger brands are the future, what is the future of the agency? That’s the question Rival, the global consultancy redefining how brands grow, is bringing to Cape Town this November at Innovation City. After four years and over 10,000 hours of research, Rival has published...
In industries like property maintenance and compliance, field teams often find themselves caught in the chaos of too many tools and too little time. PARAMOS, founded in 2024, is on a mission to change that. By connecting existing systems and simplifying workflows, the platform empowers...
