South African founders get Irish ‘immersion’ at Dogpatch Labs

Vish Gain sat down with some of the South African start-ups that won the Irish Tech Challenge after being selected from a pool of more than 250 applicants.

Thato Schermer started her career as a management consultant at McKinsey in Johannesburg nearly 10 years ago, but soon grew “tired of making pretty slides”. She moved on to a role as chief of staff to the global CEO of a healthcare company, eventually finding herself at the upper echelons of Uber in 2019, where she co-chaired the Women at Uber group for the EMEA region.

And then, of course, came the pandemic.

“During the pandemic, I had a kind of an epiphany moment where I asked myself the question of how I might use my skills, my access and my networks to try and build something that would make an impact,” she told me in an interview last week.

Schermer is one of five founders who made their way to Dogpatch Labs in Dublin from South Africa last week after winning the Irish Tech Challenge organised by the Irish Embassy. These five start-ups were selected from a pool of more than 250 applicants, so they’re some of the most talented entrepreneurs the fast-growing economy of 60m has to offer.

“Given that I had experience in healthcare, I saw that no one was really solving intentionally around the female consumer, which is absolutely ironic simply due to our biology and our engineering, we just have different needs,” Schermer explained.

“And so here you have a consumer who not only has a fantastic customer lifetime value, because you can serve her from puberty through to menopause with specialised healthcare needs; she’s often also the main decision maker for herself and her family.”

Schermer went on to use her experience in leadership and healthcare to found Zoie Health in 2020, a health-tech start-up based in Johannesburg that is one of South Africa’s first digital women’s health clinics.

The platform provides healthcare services and products focused on women’s health. Most importantly, access to the service is made easy through an integration with WhatsApp.

“While we do have an app, our most popular platform is WhatsApp. People can make purchases and book consultations through what is the most downloaded messaging app in all of Africa,” Schermer explained. Advantages of using WhatsApp to deliver services include the availability of basic smartphones and the low data requirements of messaging apps.

“You don’t need a super smartphone to have WhatsApp, most people already have it. And our objective has been to reduce that friction in accessing healthcare.”

In search of talent

Tumelo Chiloane is one of the five founders who were at Dogpatch last week, for what the organisers call Immersion Week as part of the Irish Tech Challenge.

His start-up, Desert Green Africa, is connecting farmers with traders via an agritech platform to address rural South Africa’s food security problem. The company’s flagship product, GreenKart, connects small-scale farmers directly to informal traders.

“In Africa, retail is predominantly informal. We are talking about ‘mom and pop’ stores, people that resell fresh produce at taxi stands and bus stops – so that’s quite big retail. It so happens that small-scale farmers heavily rely on that market, but there are a lot of inefficiencies in the supply chain,” Chiloane explained.

“Instead of trying to formalise small-scale farmers, we wondered how we can improve the inefficiencies in this informal retail so that the farmers are able to better benefit from it.”

Launched in 2022, GreenKart is a B2B e-commerce platform that, other than connecting the two parties, also provides delivery services and ‘buy now, pay later’ credit facilities to ease trade between farmers and traders, such as street vendors and small shops.

Tumelo Chiloane, co-founder of Desert Green Africa, at Dogpatch. Image: Paul Gleeson

Chiloane, who admires Dublin’s weather – much to my surprise – because it reminds him of Cape Town, said that one of his objectives in coming to Dublin was to expand his network and immerse himself in the Irish ecosystem.

“We are currently raising funding so that we can increase our distribution capacity, and that’s one opportunity I’m looking to explore through connections here,” he said. As winners of the Irish Tech Challenge, the participants at the Immersion Week each received €10,000 to give them a head start.

“But the other major thing is tech talent. I’m not a developer, none of us are developers. So far, we’ve been building with external suppliers. One of the things was, how can we come here and maybe partner with Irish-based talent that can help us with the tech side of things?” Chiloane said.

Another South African start-up I came across, AfroBodies, was full of surprises. For one, the biopharma start-up produces antibodies from alpacas – yes, you read that right – for use in life sciences research, food safety, diagnostics and therapeutics.

Moreover, it was co-founded by South African entrepreneur Benedicta Durcan and her partner Dr Peter Durcan, who is originally from Ireland and studied sport and exercise science at University of Limerick before moving to the UK to complete a PhD in molecular biology research.

‘Learning has gone both ways’

Based in Cape Town, AfroBodies has built a platform that acts as a tool for scientists working on a range of areas from heart and lung disease and different types of cancers to even chemicals for agricultural treatment.

“They [the scientists] will be likely looking for a molecule to bind to the substance that they have introduced to the protein, chemical or virus. And so, we make an antibody that will recognise that in the system and bind to it using our discovery platform,” CEO Benedicta Durcan explained.

‘They identified a social issue plaguing the community and built a whole start-up out of the sheer determination to solve that issue’
^{– ASHLEY SHAK}

Antibodies discovered by AfroBodies were among the first in the world to undergo laboratory testing against the so-called Covid-19 South Africa variant.

Peter Durcan, who has lived in South Africa for 12 years and is the chief scientific officer of AfroBodies, said he is now looking to expand the company’s operations.

“This is why we’re very excited to be here in Ireland to look at how we can expand our company because we’re convinced that these biological molecules that we know now how to discover – we see a very big market potential across life science research, diagnostics and therapeutics.”

All five start-ups presented their business ideas and expansion plans at a showcase event in Dogpatch as a culmination of the Irish Tech Challenge last week.

“What is amazing about working with these founders is witnessing how they identified a social issue plaguing the community and built a whole start-up out of the sheer determination to solve that issue. You just don’t pick up that type of grit in your typical university degree or internship,” said Ashley Shak of Dogpatch Labs, who was the MC.

“The purpose of this immersion week was for the founders to learn what they need to do in order to scale to Ireland. But we’ve discovered over the last few days that the learning has definitely gone both ways. And over the last week here in Ireland, the founders have learned that their start-up solutions are just as applicable here.”

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