Zanele Matome, Welo Health

When Zanele Matome shuttered her mining company after the owners of a Rustenburg mine she serviced divested, she lost her Bryanston home and was forced to move back in with her mother, three kids in tow. Starting a tech company was the last thing on her mind.

“I knew about tech before, but I thought it was something for geeks,” she says. Matome is the founder of Gauteng-based Welo Health, and five years after launching, the healthtech startup is now set to expand into the rest of Africa. In 2023, a R3mn investment from local company Aions Ventures, the venture arm of Aions Creative Technology, helped the company run a successful pilot with a BMW supplier in Botswana. The investment adds to the roughly R10mn it had previously raised, Google reported earlier this year, after the business graduated from its latest Startups Accelerator. Welo Health helps employers, employees, and medical aids lower medical costs by, among other things, linking companies with nurses and doctors that offer home care to an employer’s staff, in what Matome describes as an “Uber for healthcare”.