Savant

Seed+ Fund

Savant is a sector agnostic incubator and venture capital company that exists to help hardware technology businesses conceptualize, invent and scale.

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The Seed+ Fund was borne out of our experiences in the Incubator – where we saw many promising hardware startups battling to raise funding. Until the establishment of the Seed+ Fund, there was no dedicated early stage investor for hardware startups in South Africa.

About Venture Fund

As the only dedicated hardware, deep-tech and IoT investor in South Africa, our Seed+ Fund supported by the Savant Venture Fund fills a critical gap in the innovation ecosystem. Our appetite to invest pre-revenue means we are the first commercial cheques in the majority of investments. Until the establishment of the Seed+ Fund, there was no dedicated early stage investor for hardware startups.

Investment Mandate

The Fund invests in early stage (pre-revenue and recently post revenue) science and engineering-based hardware, deep-tech and IoT startups with both local and international market opportunities.

We invest early in world-class founders attacking large, global markets. We believe at the core of a great business, is a great team. We look for teams that are passionate, driven, and coachable. We are active investors and get involved in growing and developing the business, in order to realise value. We invest from R 250 000 to R 15 000 000 and use SAFEs, convertible notes and other relevant early-stage funding mechanism

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How startups benefit

Startups benefit from our aggressive early-stage investment appetite, 18 years of incubation experience and track record of taking hardware companies to market both locally and internationally.

Our approach is to prepare companies for market (and investment), launch them to the local market, validate their product and commercial model and on the back of these validations, prepare the company for international markets – and international series A funding.

What are we looking for?

What us the main thing Savant looks for when investing in a company?

Successful companies, in our experience, come in many different shapes and sizes, but have a few attributes in common at the early stage. These include: the quality of the founding team, how well they’ve considered their customer, the market size of their opportunity and their customers’ challenges, how this represents itself in the product they’ve created, and lastly how much funding is required to really demonstrate product market fit. The better articulated the above points are, the more comfort we feel in whether we can deliver value to the founding team.

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When is the right time to approach Savant for an investment?

We are generally the first capital into the majority of our companies to date. These companies have ranged from technology development to market entry and even post revenue. We appreciate different businesses are at different stages when they learn about us. But from the point you have a prototype (pre-revenue) through to when you have early revenue, we are happy to learn more about what you do and consider you for investment. This is really our sweet spot for providing rocket fuel for startups on their journey ahead.