Cape Town - Nelson Mandela Metropolitan University (NMMU) has announced the first winner of the Mandela Bay Entrepreneur Fellowship.
The Fellowship is the first of 10 to be awarded to masters and PhD graduates from NMMU’s Department of Computing Sciences and School of ICT who commit to joining or launching a startup.
Graduate Martin Smuts received R100 000 for the growth of Avinci Consult.
“What they do with the money is up to them, as long as they commit at least 12 months to a start-up… Most entrepreneurs just need 12 months’ breathing room so they can get on their feet and pay the bills. Hopefully the fellowship helps with this,” said Alan Knott-Craig jnr, an NMMU alumnus who has underwritten the award for the next decade.
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The purpose of the award is to drive diversity in the local tech industry and Knott-Craig said that neither NMMU nor managing company Happimo will take equity positions in the startups.
“It’s my alma mater, but more importantly it has the most diverse postgrad student body of any computer science department in the country… The future of technology entrepreneurship in Africa can’t be white and male. We need more black and female tech entrepreneurs. I believe NMMU can produce them,” said Knott-Craig, Happimo founder.
Avinci Consult is a business intelligence company specialising in business processes, enterprise solutions and data analysis.
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