Knife Capital

Building a VC ecosystem of positivity - and champagne bubbles

“We are a venture capital firm that focuses on innovation-driven businesses with proven traction. I’m fascinated by the bubbles in champagne. The more you celebrate, the more you celebrate so we try and live that!

Living in Cape Town, I don’t think you can do it without a Harley Davidson to ride around the peninsula on a beautiful day and just clear your head, where no-one can get hold of you.

At Knife Capital, we’re a pretty passionate bunch. We look at the full investment chain which we define as find, make, grow, realise. We don’t sit behind our desks and wait for businesses to magically hit our inbox – they do, but they are not the good ones. The good ones, you go out and find in the ecosystem.

We’ve got an accelerator called Grindstone, where we help earlier stage businesses get more funding ready at the growth stage or just become much more sustainable.

Basically, we do a deconstructed due diligence; we’re really focusing on their intellectual property, their legal, their marketing story, financials, etc. We have some excellent partners, including Ansarada.

Our journey with Ansarada started awhile back; I think we were one of the first clients in South Africa. Data rooms are really important for us, because one of the things we’ve learned is that interesting things happen to interesting businesses - you have to be prepared.

We really help those companies get funding ready, get investment ready; to set up their data rooms with Ansarada software in the early stage. Some of those businesses have gone on to do amazing exits.

Some of those Grindstone entrepreneurs - where we haven’t even invested in the companies - they have now invested back in our funds because they are angel investors that suddenly have too much money via an exit and this is a good space for that.

That has a massive ripple effect on the ecosystem of positivity – entrepreneurs who know what they are doing, they become mentors and they can pump all that knowledge back into the ecosystem.”