Knife Capital

Keet van Zyl and Andrea Böhmert are the named partners leading deal sourcing, diligence, and portfolio management at Knife Capital. Both co-founded the firm in 2010 after spinning out the venture and growth practice from Mark Shuttleworth's HBD Group. The investment committee operates as a partnership, with major decisions made jointly by the senior team in Cape Town.

Grindstone is a growth accelerator owned and operated by Knife Capital, offering structured strategic support to start-ups and scale-ups. It functions as a proprietary deal-sourcing and company-building engine, giving the fund early and deep access to founders before they enter the broader fundraising market. While legally separate from the main fund entities, it shares the same investment team and feeds directly into Knife Capital's pipeline.

Knife Capital denominates its venture funds in US dollars, which is unusual among South Africa-based VC managers. This structure protects fund economics from the rand's historical depreciation and aligns the denomination with the international LP commitments — including IFC and European family offices — that back the firm. It also gives portfolio companies hard-currency capital to pay for offshore infrastructure and talent.

Knife Capital targets expansion-stage companies, typically writing initial equity checks of $1M to $5M with reserves for follow-on funding through subsequent rounds. The firm looks for B2B technology companies that have demonstrated product-market fit and initial revenue traction, rather than pre-revenue or seed-stage startups.

While Cape Town and Johannesburg are its core deal-flow hubs, Knife Capital evaluates opportunities across sub-Saharan Africa where it identifies scalable B2B technology businesses. The firm's mandate is pan-African, though the concentration of its portfolio has historically favored South Africa, the continent's largest and most liquid technology market, alongside select investments in other English-speaking African markets.