There is a particular kind of distance between Wall Street and Lebowakgomo, a township in South Africa’s Limpopo Province.
One is synonymous with global finance, enormous transactions and institutions moving billions of dollars across markets. The other is where Grace Legodi grew up in a family shaped by the horrors of apartheid, an enforced system of racial segregation, where her parents, a teacher and a social worker, placed an unusually high premium on education.
Legodi eventually crossed that distance.
She studied finance at the University of Cape Town, worked in mergers and acquisitions at Goldman Sachs, a global investment powerhouse, in New York and Johannesburg, and spent more than a decade across investment banking, venture capital and entrepreneurship development.
Today, she is back in South Africa building Keyo Ventures, an investment manager financing early-stage businesses at the intersection of technology, infrastructure and the green economy across the Southern African Development Community (SADC). The Venture Capital (VC) firm backs companies working in areas such as electric mobility, water, waste management and sustainable agriculture, businesses that often look less like traditional software startups and more like the physical infrastructure behind the next generation of African technology.
But Legodi’s return home is not simply a story about a finance professional leaving Wall Street for African entrepreneurship.
It is about what happens when someone who has spent years inside one of the world’s most sophisticated capital markets decides that its rules do not always work for the innovation and businesses being built at home. “Keyo is a data-driven investor that unlocks capital for early-stage tech-enabled startups in the green economy and asset-backed businesses in Southern Africa,” the company’s website screams in bold letters.
For Legodi, the problem is not simply that Southern African startups need more money. It is that the financial system is often designed for companies that already have the scale, track record, collateral or predictability that early-stage businesses do not yet possess.