SA Innovation Summit announces new headline sponsor

The SA Innovation Summit (SAIS) has announced the Technology Innovation Agency (TIA) as the headline sponsor for this year’s event alongside the host city, Cape Town. The summit is scheduled for 27 to 29 September at the Old Biscuit.

TIA is an entity of the department of science and innovation mandated to promote the development and exploitation of discoveries, inventions, innovations, and improvements in the public interest. Through the partnership, TIA and SAIS will collaborate in interventions that support early-stage enterprise building for start-ups and TIA supported innovators.

Since its launch in 2007, the summit has been instrumental in showcasing and positioning South Africa as a key enabler on the African continent raising $22 million worth of investments at last year’s summit. The event brings together top entrepreneurs, investors, corporates, policy makers and thought leaders to support start-ups and inspire sustained economic growth across Africa.

“TIA is delighted to be a headline sponsor for the 15th SA Innovation Summit,” says Patrick Krappie, acting chief executive of TIA.

“The partnership with SAIS is in line with agency’s vision to be a world class leading innovation agency that supports and stimulates technology innovation to improve the quality of life for all South Africans. To affirm our role as an active funder, connector, facilitator, and enabler, we will continue to make concerted efforts to build partnerships and collaborations with like-minded institutions that share a similar vision with ourselves. In the partnership with SAIS, we hope to reach more start-ups that can benefit from the support that the agency can offer.”

“Among our goals for this year is to increase the quality pipeline of female, grassroots, and youth early-stage innovation-driven founders,” adds Buntu Majaja, chief executive of SA Innovation Summit.

“Also, our new foodtech programme will see selected start-ups share their solutions for improving food security, which again highlights the high quality of entrepreneurs we have on our own shores who are solving today and tomorrow’s crisis. With TIA on board, we believe that we can give wings to the success stories that are supported by TIA in the ecosystem and raise the rate of commercialisation and scale-up success of start-ups going through the SA Innovation Summit programmes.”

The programme includes a deep dive into the blockchain and brings modern toolkits to founders through masterclasses. It tackles how ecosystems can support the impact of great new ideas, share the secrets on how to make unicorns in Africa and looks at corporate venture capital and the latest on the start-up act.

By attending, entrepreneurs get automatic access to the summit’s unique business matching platform where they can meet up with investors, find collaborative partners and explore new markets through productive meetings over the three days. The events on 27 and 28 September will be at Old Biscuit Mill in Salt River while events of 29 September will be held in partnership with Innovation City at their premises in Gardens with the aim to help grow the digital ecosystem within South Africa.

Among the speakers for this year are City of Cape Town and how they have become “Silicone Cape” attracting tech talent and money to the Mother City. The department of science and innovation launches and showcases preliminary successes of the Innovation Fund, GoGetta expands on the wave of crowd funding.

Von Seidels invites attendees to the Metaverse and world of IP law at the forefront of innovation, while Newtown Partners brings together Africa’s CXOs to unlock corporate venture capital and play host to an NFT auction where top local art will be showcased and sold.

Last year’s Innovation Summit welcomed over 150 local and global venture capital and angel investors as well as some 1500 early-stage entrepreneurs, serial entrepreneurs, professionals at leading corporations, and industry thought leaders and 48 industry expert speakers.

Tickets can be booked online.

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