When Alison Collier was approached to run Endeavor South Africa, she wasn’t immediately convinced. She was splitting her time between Singapore and Switzerland as head of Unilever’s global procurement excellence team, and the outfit looked like just another nonprofit. It wasn’t.
“I first was a bit hesitant because it’s an NGO and my roles previously have always been purely commercial,” she says.
Her view was that businesses needed private capital earning strong returns to sustain their growth. But Endeavor’s work — helping entrepreneurs access markets, networks, mentorship and capital — changed her mind. Suddenly, “I was quite anxious that they were going to choose someone else”.
She took the job in April 2019, after more than 15 years abroad. A University of Cape Town business science graduate with an MBA from INSEAD, she had worked at McKinsey and SABMiller before spending four years building rooibos iced tea maker BOS’s sales in Europe, then joining Unilever.
Endeavor has brought her to the coalface of entrepreneurship back home. A business can have a good product and growing sales, yet struggle to find an overseas customer, investor or partner.
“I really just love building businesses,” she says. “There was so much opportunity in South Africa to really grow the market if we could just get the right capital to be invested into local businesses.”
Endeavor operates in 45 markets and supports more than 2,900 entrepreneurs. The South African office works with about 100 businesses.
To get in, a business typically needs at least R10m in annual revenue, growing 50%–100% a year, Collier says, and unanimous approval from local and global selection panels.
The results stand out in an economy that has averaged GDP growth of less than 1% a year over the past decade. Endeavor says 27 of its South African entrepreneurs grew revenue by an average 29% a year between 2021 and 2025, creating 5,150 jobs. “They’re built for the global markets.”
Digital banking group Tyme, with more than 23-million customers across South Africa and the Philippines, is among those that joined. Its South African bank launched as TymeBank in 2019, combining digital banking with kiosks at Pick n Pay. Now serving 13-million local customers, it rebranded as GoTyme Bank this year.
“So I knew when Tyme was looking to expand to the Philippines that Endeavor could be very valuable to them,” she says.
At an Endeavor event in New York, Tyme’s team stepped into a lift with Nubank founder David Vélez and Endeavor’s then global president, who introduced them. In December 2024, the Brazilian digital bank led a $250m funding round in Tyme that valued the group at $1.5bn.
Tyme co-founder Tjaart van der Walt now sits on Endeavor South Africa’s board and on panels selecting other entrepreneurs.
Collier brought her commercial thinking to Endeavor’s finances. The office had relied on corporate projects and board members’ donations. Its Harvest funds now co-invest in Endeavor companies alongside lead investors.
In most venture funds, carried interest — the managers’ share of profits — goes to individuals. “We just take all of the carry and invest it back into Endeavor to then cover the costs of running our team,” Collier says. Those funds already cover close to half of the office’s operating expenses.
In April 2026, Endeavor closed Harvest Fund III at R230m. Its backers include FirstRand, Standard Bank and Allan Gray, as well as Van der Walt and fellow Tyme co-founder Coen Jonker.
Collier wishes pension funds would invest 0.5%–1% of their assets into venture capital (some reports put current levels at about 0.2%), but she sees why they hesitate.
Fund managers would announce exits but withhold the numbers, leaving little to show institutional investors. That’s changing. “There have been a lot of exits that have been bigger and teams have been comfortable to share numbers.”
She points to Nedbank’s R1.65bn purchase of card machine maker iKhokha and Motorola Solutions’ takeover of Cape Town-born emergency call software firm RapidDeploy. Fintech Optasia listed on the JSE in November 2025 at a market value of R23.5bn.
In July, Endeavor, the SA SME Fund and industry body Savca released a study of 226 realised exits by local fund managers between 2009 and 2026 that found they returned 2.01 to 2.45 times the capital invested.
Still, it isn’t always easy. Serial founders learn to survive the inevitable periods when their original plan doesn’t work, or what worked in one venture doesn’t apply in the next. “Entrepreneurship doesn’t work that way.”
So, do founders here need to be bulletproof? “You definitely need to be streetwise.”
