Business personalities on the JSE often come and go, sometimes slinking off in disgrace, reappearing in a blaze of glory, then fizzling out again.
Older readers might remember Jeff Liebesman, who had successive ventures with W&A Holdings and Corpcapital, neither of which had fairytale endings. Then there was former Nedbank CEO Piet Liebenberg, who re-emerged in the late 1990s with the novel but short-lived The Business Bank (its banking licence was used to start Capitec). Mining doyen Brian Gilbertson made a comeback via Pallinghurst Resources.
Reinventions are always worth watching. Take Michiel le Roux, who went from running a liquor giant to helping PSG build out Capitec, arguably South Africa’s most successful start-up. After a misadventure in the uranium business, Neal Froneman re-emerged as a highly successful consolidator in the gold and platinum industry via, first, GoldOne International and then Sibanye-Stillwater. Then there was Brian Joffe, who could have rested on his laurels as the prime mover at Bidvest but took up leading roles in forming Afrocentric (out of the WB Holdings shell) and later investment company Long4Life.
With that context, perhaps investors might want to keep an eye on developments at Numeral Ltd, a small cap with a curious combination of businesses: stem-cell banking, biotechnology, health care and, increasingly, financial services. It recently reported higher revenue and laid out plans to raise fresh capital at its AGM in Pretoria last week.
Look a little closer at the company, though, and a familiar name appears: Dave van Niekerk.
The entrepreneur behind Blue Financial Services and MyBucks is now an executive director and major shareholder of Numeral, his third major listed business venture.
“I actually got involved by accident,” Van Niekerk tells the FM.
When he left fintech group MyBucks after a bruising shareholder battle, the exit arrangement left him holding shares in Go Life International, a small Mauritian health-care company with a secondary listing on the JSE.
The picture was not pretty. Several investments had fallen away, and the balance sheet had been badly weakened. But one business remained.
“They had a stem-cell business called Cryo-Save. And that was really the crown jewel of what they had. Everything else was basically gone,” says Van Niekerk.
He “got stuck in”, negotiating with the company’s advisers, replacing management and agreeing to inject capital if he could change the strategy.
Van Niekerk says it’s taken him about four years to get the business to where it is now. Battles were fought with former management, shareholders and regulators, but finally Go Life was transformed into Numeral.
It is an unusual pivot for an entrepreneur whose career has largely been in finance rather than biotech.
Blue was the ambitious pan-African microlender Van Niekerk founded and built across more than a dozen countries during the 2000s. At its peak it was one of the JSE’s market darlings. Then the wheels came off. In 2010, Blue reported a R1.03bn annual loss and required a rescue recapitalisation.
Van Niekerk’s explanation centres on the global financial crisis and AIG, the US financial giant that had become a major shareholder and funder of Blue’s expansion.
“The mandate was to grow at all costs,” he says. “And that last year before I exited, we grew by a billion rand in a year. And then they just stopped funding because they had run out of money themselves.”
He remains proud of what Blue built, even if its unravelling is now part of his business record.
Then came MyBucks.
Van Niekerk founded the fintech lender in 2012, expanded it across several African markets and listed it in Frankfurt in 2016. He stepped down in 2019 after a battle over the company’s direction as Ecsponent (later renamed Afristrat) increased its influence. MyBucks was placed in bankruptcy by a Luxembourg court in 2022.
His lesson from MyBucks is to choose your partners carefully. “You let the wrong fox into the henhouse and you’re going to get hurt.”
It is a lesson that may prove particularly relevant to what comes next, because Van Niekerk is building again.
Numeral is built around biotechnology and health care. However, true to form, Van Niekerk has already started bolting on financial services.
At its centre is Cryo-Save, which collects, processes and stores stem-cell material, particularly cord blood and tissue collected at birth. Customers pay for the initial collection and processing and then for long-term storage, giving the business both transactional and recurring revenue.
Those two activities generated about $1.5m in Numeral’s latest financial year — roughly 70% of group revenue. The broader biotech and health-care segment accounted for more than 96% of group revenue in the latest quarter.
“What’s happening in biotech is going to make fintech look like a baby,” says Van Niekerk.
Blood-forming stem cells, including those obtained from cord blood, are used in transplants to treat a range of blood cancers and disorders. But some of the much broader applications being investigated in regenerative medicine remain experimental rather than routine.
“This is a billion-rand business,” he says.
There is plenty of money chasing the sector. In its latest Biotech Beyond Borders report, EY says the biotech industry generated $232bn in revenue in 2025, while its market capitalisation climbed almost 29% to $1.65-trillion.
Numeral’s exposure to that sprawling industry is fairly narrow still. For now, its core is biobanking and health-care services, alongside a growing collection of health and wellness ventures.
Van Niekerk also wants to bring his old speciality into the equation. “There’s a big financial element to it.”
On the face of it, stem cells and lending make strange bedfellows. Van Niekerk explains that increasingly sophisticated health care is expensive. A family who want to bank a child’s stem cells may prefer to finance the cost rather than pay tens of thousands of rand upfront. The same could apply to other treatments and preventative-health products.
Numeral is now preparing for a significant funding push. After its AGM last week, Van Niekerk said their immediate priorities include achieving a proper dual listing on the JSE and the Stock Exchange of Mauritius, rather than its current primary and secondary listing structure. It also plans to list a bond programme and to bring in fresh equity to capitalise its lending business.
It has set its sights on raising as much as R100m through a share issue after completing a 10-for-one consolidation of its shares.
The fresh capital is important because, though revenue is growing, the balance sheet remains heavily geared. At the end of May it carried about $4m in borrowings against an equity base of just more than $200,000.
Progress for the company faced another complication: Numeral was recently forced to restate its prior-year numbers after a JSE review.
The exchange’s proactive monitoring process identified errors involving, among other things, acquisition accounting, taxation, financial instruments and the classification of income and expenses.
Van Niekerk argues that regulators paid relatively little attention while the old Go Life struggled, only to scrutinise the business once new shareholders and management had started rebuilding it.
“I’m not going to say we were blameless,” he concedes. He says too much was left to the Mauritian auditor, which had not been sufficiently stringent about the JSE’s interpretation of IFRS requirements.
This came to a head at Numeral’s AGM. When the resolution to reappoint Barnes Associates as the company’s auditor came up for consideration, no shareholder nominated or seconded the firm’s return. Chair Mohamed Yusuf Sooklall remarked that this was “for obvious reasons”.
Another familiar face was also in attendance at the AGM. Numeral COO Neville Graham previously worked with Van Niekerk at MyBucks before becoming head of lending at TymeBank. Van Niekerk brought him back when he began rebuilding Numeral.
“We’ve worked so well together in the past,” says Van Niekerk. “He has meticulous attention to detail. He doesn’t leave a number unticked and unchecked.”
Numeral is an unusual new chapter for Van Niekerk, but some of the familiar ingredients are there: rapid growth ambitions, financial services, capital raising and a willingness to think big.
Whether those lessons translate into a more durable outcome for his third act will take time to judge. Van Niekerk, though, is clear about what he thinks will matter most as Numeral enters its next phase.
“The revenue is going to be what everyone needs to watch,” he says.