Aisha Pandor’s SweepSouth is now a decade old and moving forward under new leadership with its eye on international expansion.
The entrepreneur has her eyes set on investing and growing more businesses, while exploring passions in health technology (health tech).
“We’ve helped 50,000, primarily women, access work opportunities over the past 10 years, which is a big milestone that we reached in June,” Pandor told Business Day.
SweepSouth, which was co-founded in 2014 by Pandor and Alen Ribic, has traditionally connected clients to vetted cleaners. That service has since grown to include a number of others, such as beauty and maintenance.
The number of registered professionals has grown fivefold from 10,000 in 2018. By 2023, the platform had reached 2-million bookings, up from 100,000 in 2017 and 2,000 monthly bookings in 2015.
With this progress, Pandor has decided to step down as CEO and pass the reins to Lourandi Kriel, a former CEO of Cartrack’s Asia Pacific business.
“Some founders are great at building companies over multiple decades, whereas other founders prefer the earlier stages where it’s about getting things started. The zero to one,” said Pandor.
“Personally, it got to a point where I realised that the business would be helped by having leadership on board that could navigate this new growth phase — positioning ourselves for scale at an even bigger level. It was a decision that was a good few years in the making.”
At the tail end of 2021, the company acquired 100% of Egyptian start-up Filkhedma for an undisclosed sum. Established in 2014, Filkhedma is a home services marketplace operating across three cities that provides tens of thousands of customers with cleaning, maintenance and beauty services through a network of more than 2,000 service providers at the time it was bought.
According to Kriel, the focus is now on expanding the company’s service offering internally and through possible acquisitions.
“Currently, we have the home cleaning services, pool cleaning, gardening, handyman, maintenance services that are available in SA. Going over to Egypt, [we have] beauticians coming to your home and masseuses. They’re strong on the business-to-business side as well, servicing maintenance of entire companies. A big market for us in Egypt is air conditioning services,” she said.
“Globally, we want to do more inside the home that makes life easier for the homeowner ... pet care, pet sitting, baby sitting ... and then expanding more from the home into businesses.”
SweepSouth’s business model has attracted attention from investors.
In 2019, the Naspers Foundry invested R30m in SweepSouth, with another R15m raised through a separate round later that year. The company’s largest capital raise was in 2022 with an $11m (R198m at the time) infusion from Alitheia IDF (AIF).
The company, which is gearing up for another round of funding, has a list of investors that includes the Michael & Susan Dell Foundation, Futuregrowth Asset Management, Endeavor Catalyst, Endeavor SA’s Harvest Fund II, Caruso Ventures and E4E Africa.
Pandor, who is now an investor herself, is working on new ventures.
“I’m a founding partner of E4E Africa, which is a venture capital fund. We’re in the process of raising a second fund. We invest in underrepresented founders in SA. We’ve got a couple of companies that we’ve invested in in Kenya as well, who are building tech-enabled solutions,” she said.
“My background is in human genetics. I’ve always been interested in the biotech and health tech space. In terms of my own venture, I’m working on a very exciting project ... using AI [artificial intelligence] to help women better manage chronic health conditions and to use the data collected in a meaningful way.”
Pandor is co-founder and CEO of Pandora Biosciences & Pandora Health.
Would you like to comment on this article?
Sign up (it's quick and free) or sign in now.
Please read our Comment Policy before commenting.