Naspers Closes Foundry

Sadly, Naspers announced that they are shutting down their Foundry, the R1.4 billion fund focused on South African startups. Naspers Foundry was launched in 2019 to focus on early-stage investments in South African companies that could become large future holdings for Naspers. Some of the investments include SweepSouth, Aerobotics and Naked Insurance.

The group says that they will continue to support their existing holdings and that future South African investments will come from Prosus Ventures, the internationally-based investment arm of Prosus. This unfortunately means it will be harder for South African start-ups to get funding.

It looks like Naspers pulled the plug on the Foundry for two reasons. International tech companies are slimming down, cutting back on costs. Having an investing arm deploying money into very early-stage companies is high risk, and is an easy place to start saving. I personally think they should rather have cut the bonuses of Bob and other senior executives, but that's a rant for another day.

It also seems that the Foundry struggled to find enough suitable investments. Over four years it has only managed to deploy half of the money available. There have also been close to zero new listings on the JSE in the last 7 years. The lack of local economic growth has made it tough for new companies to establish themselves and scale up.