The venture capital firm known as Knife Capital has expanded the services that it offers by opening an office of operations in London, United Kingdom.
This expansion was taken after they introduced a strategic investor known as the UK-based Draper-Gain Investments
Draper-Gain happens to be a family office with substantial global resources which includes existing investments into companies in South Africa.
A former Springbok rugby captain named Bobby Skinstad is now heading the business development for Draper-Gain.
Skinstad is an Angel Investor who is in KNF Ventures, Knife Capital’s partner. KNF Ventures is a startup that was launched last year.
Skinstad said, “Over the past year, Knife Capital impressed Draper-Gain while conducting several due diligences and executing the subsequent transactions. This evolved into Draper-Gain taking a strategic stake in Knife Capital and committing funding as its lead international investor.”
The investment partner at Knife capital, Keet Van Zyl, was both impressed and positive about the decisions to expand the company into the UK market.
“The South African early stage investment ecosystem is built on the risk capital of local angels and international investors. Unfortunately, local institutional investors largely avoid this space,” Keet Van Zyl said, “While we will continue to work at changing this mindset, we are now creating a flexible structure for those international family offices which want to invest with us alongside KNF’s local 12J backers.”
Knife Capital sold into Africa Dawn, its financial services group, back in 2014. The startup’s expected synergies were unsuccessful, so the Knife Capital team decided to take back the ownership of its company.