Zachariah (Zach) George is a Managing Partner at Launch Africa Ventures – the most prominent and active early-stage Venture Capital Fund across Africa, solving the significant gap in the pre-Series A investment landscape in Africa. He is also the co-founder and Chief Investment Officer at Startupbootcamp AfriTech – the leading multi-corporate backed venture accelerator program in Africa. Zach is widely recognized as one of Africa’s most prominent Angel investors, with investments in 100+ of the leading tech startups in Africa including Flutterwave, Kudabank, Marketforce, Peach Payments, RecoMed and several others.
Zach was co-featured on the cover of Fast Company Africa in May 2018, Destiny Man Magazine in November 2019, and in December 2019 was recognized as one of the Top 10 Most Influential People in Technology in Africa. In January 2020, he was listed as one of the Top Four Movers and Shapers of Technology in Africa by the prestigious French business daily – Les Echos. From 2011 to 2014, Zach led the Africa operations of U-Start – a Swiss based global investment advisory firm specializing in direct
and indirect venture capital investments in the tech and digital sector for private investors (family offices and high net-worth Individuals) as well as VC funds, corporate ventures and wealth management institutions. Prior to moving to South Africa, he was an investment banker on Wall Street covering mergers & acquisitions, corporate finance strategy and risk management at Lehman Brothers and Barclays Capital, New York. In May 2010, he voluntarily left the global financial sector and moved to Africa where he spent a year consulting to micro-finance organizations and impact-driven venture capital enterprises, including a 6-month stint as a Professor of Finance for an Ashoka award winning Social Entrepreneurship MBA program in Nairobi.
Since August 2011, Zach has been based in Cape Town.vZach is a Certified Business Adviser at the Institute of Business Advisers and is a member of the Institute of Directors in Southern Africav(IoDSA). He is a mentor for High Impact Endeavor entrepreneurs and has been featured on CNBC Africa on several occasions as well
as on Disrupt Africa , Cliff Central , Entrepreneur Magazine and the prestigious Stanford Graduate School of Business Grit and Growth podcast Series.
Prior to his Wall Street career, at the age of 22, Zach got his Master’s degree in Management Science from Stanford University, California specializing in Corporate Finance. During the course of his degree, he was invited by the United Nations Secretariat to work on U.N. projects for the Department of Management and Procurement in New York. Zach is a Mechanical Engineer from the Indian Institute of Technology and a member of MENSA International – The Global High IQ Society with an IQ in the top 2 percentile globally.
He has lived and worked in the Middle East, California, New York, India, Kenya and South Africa. Outside of his professional life, Zach is an acoustic guitarist/vocalist with cover albums ‘Give A Little’ (2010) and ‘Humans with Hearts’ (2018) on iTunes and Spotify. He is an avid lover of theater and the performing arts, likes hiking and a good game of tennis. He enjoys creative writing and is currently busy finishing a work of non-fiction. Zach is a dad to three children and lives in the coastal suburb of Woodbridge Island just outside of Cape Town.
