Cape Town: Africa's home of digital innovation

Cape Town has long been recognised as one of Africa's hubs of digital innovation and a natural place from which to launch a tech-based start-up company. Together with Johannesburg, Cape Town comes up ahead of other African centres of commercial activity, including Lagos and Nairobi. 

Over the past decade, Cape Town has become a market leader in fields such as mobile software, payment processes and revenue management. According to interviews carried out between 2017 and 2018, digital professionals find that the relaxed lifestyle for which Cape Town is renowned promotes new ways of thinking and inspires creativity. These thought processes and innovations lead directly to the type of groundbreaking ideas that have been coming out of the Mother City. In a nutshell, Cape Town's blend of nature, oceans and mountains has inspired a generation of techno-creatives to achieve great things.

Examples of tech businesses that have been built from the ground up in Cape Town include, amongst many others, Snapplify, which promotes digital learning by providing a marketplace for digital educational content. TaxTim, another start-up that has emerged from the Mother City, is a virtual assistant that helps people through the daunting process of submitting their tax returns to the South African Revenue Service. Luno, a crypto-wallet service that now operates in over 40 countries, was started by Capetonian Timothy Stranex in 2013.

It is clear that there is no shortage of brilliant work emerging from Cape Town in the fields of technology and new business development. The Mother City received a future endorsement in October 2018, when Amazon, the world's biggest online retailer, set up shop in a new eight-storey building in Cape Town. 

Over and above this, the inaugural Africa Tech Week, held in March 2019, was hosted by the City of Cape Town. The purpose of this epic event was to bring together disruptors, thought leaders and award winners to showcase how technology can be used in the most efficient ways possible. Being the host of this event served to cement the City of Cape Town's reputation as Africa's hub of digital innovation. 

In his State of the Province address held in July 2019, Western Cape Premier Alan Winde asserted that the Western Cape government will be intensifying its support for economic growth and job creation, with the technology sector being one of the focal points of this campaign. "The city-region has become firmly established as Africa's technology hub," he commented. "I have established an economic war room that has already set to work on some of the burning issues holding back our economic progress."

An evaluation and network analysis of the Cape Town-Stellenbosch tech sector released in 2018 by Endeavor Insight showcased Cape Town and Stellenbosch as the most productive areas in Africa in terms of technological development. The report lays out a number of reasons why Cape Town is the ideal location to start a tech company - these reasons include the fact that Cape Town is perceived as a tech hub and a vibrant business community where start-ups can find the required support. Other factors include the fact that the city boasts a strong tertiary education environment and that it is a naturally inspiring location conducive to networking. 

The existence of programmes like the Cape Innovation and Technology Initiative, which promotes inclusive growth of the tech industry by supporting young entrepreneurs and offering physical hubs in Woodstock and Khayelitsha, adds further assurance that Cape Town will continue to live up to its reputation of being Africa's biggest breeding ground for digital innovation and start-up success. 

OfficePlace is on the cutting edge of commercial property in Cape Town. We offer a wide range of rentals in Cape Town, in price brackets to suit every company, from a start-up to a multinational. Contact us to discuss your requirements.