Johannesburg-based investment firm Stocks & Strauss has held the final close of its second University Technology Fund at R400mn ($24mn), lifting total commitments across its university-focused venture capital platform above R700mn ($43m) and signalling growing institutional appetite for commercialising academic intellectual property in Africa’s most industrialised economy.
The vehicle, UTF II, attracted a mix of public and private limited partners, including the SA SME Fund, Stellenbosch University, Allan & Gill Gray Philanthropies, Sanlam, Fireball Capital, the state-owned Technology Innovation Agency, and the universities of Pretoria, the Witwatersrand and Cape Town. Its mandate is to back start-ups and spin-outs built around technologies, patents and talent emerging from South African tertiary institutions and their alumni networks.
The fund sits inside a deliberately tiered structure. UTF I, a R230mn vehicle, is fully deployed and holds early-stage positions. A separate R86mn UTF Seed Fund anchors company creation at the pre-revenue stage. UTF II, the largest of the three, is designed to provide follow-on capital for early-growth and international expansion. The architecture, Stocks & Strauss said, is intended to bridge persistent funding gaps that force many promising campus-born ventures to stall between laboratory prototypes and commercial scale.
“UTF II gives us the capital base to back more companies at the point where patient, specialist funding can make the greatest difference,” said managing partner Wayne Stocks. “South Africa’s tertiary institutions are producing globally relevant technologies and founders. Our role is to help turn that potential into scalable companies that can compete internationally.”
The firm first built a track record in early-stage tech as an early backer of fintech infrastructure company Stitch. Through the dedicated university platform, it has since concentrated on deep-tech and enterprise businesses, including satellite attitude control systems maker CubeSpace, employee benefits platform Jem, and agricultural biotech company Immobazyme.
CubeSpace is expanding its footprint in the commercial small-satellite market, while Immobazyme, which develops precision fermentation-based ingredients, has reached standalone profitability on the back of a growing international customer base. Jem, a mobile-first human resources platform aimed at deskless workers in emerging economies, continues to scale across several markets.
Simon Ellis, chief executive and co-founder of Jem, described the relationship as extending beyond a conventional funder-founder tie. “Beyond the capital, their counsel has already shaped a major decision and opened doors we would never have reached alone,” he said. “They understand and back our mission to unlock the deskless workforce across emerging markets.”
The final close comes at a time when South Africa’s start-up ecosystem is showing signs of maturing, but early-stage ventures still face a shallow domestic capital pool, unreliable power supply and logistical bottlenecks. University commercialisation offices have long struggled to convert research output into viable businesses, partly because of limited pre-seed funding and a shortage of experienced venture operators willing to write small cheques. The UTF structure attempts to address that by pairing dedicated capital with an investment team that can lead rounds and actively support portfolio companies through technical and regulatory hurdles.
The SA SME Fund, one of the anchor investors, was established in 2017 by South Africa’s largest financial services groups and the government to stimulate venture capital and small business growth. Its backing of UTF II underscores a broader policy push to derive more economic value from publicly funded research. Still, the sums remain modest by global standards. Total VC investment in South Africa reached about $400mn in 2024, a fraction of the flows into comparable hubs such as Bengaluru or São Paulo.
With the fund now closed, Stocks & Strauss said it plans to accelerate the pace of deployment, targeting business models that can export South African intellectual property into international markets from an early stage. The firm’s focus on globally scalable technologies, rather than purely domestic solutions, reflects both the limited size of the local market and the nature of the innovations emerging from the country’s research-intensive universities.