Capital Connect Venture Managers

Ludwick Marishane serves as Managing Partner and Evan Jones as Partner. Marishane previously founded Headboy Industries, where he invented and manufactured DryBath, a waterless bathing product. That operating background — taking a product from concept through manufacturing in South Africa — shapes the firm's investment committee approach, which emphasizes founder market knowledge and operational readiness alongside financial metrics.

The firm targets seed and early-stage investments, typically writing the first institutional check into startups. Its portfolio includes companies at the point-of-sale financing and marketplace stage, suggesting an appetite for post-revenue but still capital-efficient businesses rather than pre-product concepts.

The firm invests across enterprise software, fintech, agritech, digital health, and industrial technology. Its common thread is software-enabled businesses solving African infrastructure bottlenecks — payments, logistics, distribution, and access. The firm has not publicly declared exclusionary sectors, though its portfolio shows no exposure to pure consumer entertainment or speculative crypto plays.

No. While headquartered in Johannesburg and concentrated in South Africa, Capital Connect has backed companies with pan-African expansion paths, including SweepSouth, which operates in Kenya and Nigeria. The firm's investment mandate covers sub-Saharan Africa broadly.

Its general partners are Black South African founders who scaled their own ventures before becoming institutional investors. Marishane's background manufacturing a physical product in South Africa gives the firm a distinct comfort investing in startups that span digital and physical infrastructure — a combination many generalist African tech investors avoid due to complexity and capital intensity.

Capital Connect operates as a separate legal entity from Headboy Industries, Marishane's earlier consumer-goods company. There is no public evidence of co-investment or shared balance sheets between the two entities. The connection is the operating experience the founding team brings to investment decisions, not a linked corporate structure.

No. The firm has not publicly disclosed AUM or specific fund sizes. Like many early-stage African venture firms, it has not issued press releases detailing fund closes or deployment totals, making independent verification of scale difficult.