Recently, Partner Elite (PE), a division of Raizcorp, together with Karoobos Investments invested an undisclosed, but significant, sum in IoTdc, an innovative and rapidly growing internet-of-things (IoT) company. This partnership will provide support to scale IoTdc.
Even though the majority of IoTdc’s clients are large solution integrators and IT resellers predominantly in the telecom industry, investors are excited about this partnership because IoTdc are also supporting and enabling a large number of smaller IoT solution providers.
CEO of Raizcorp, Allon Raiz, commented: “IoTdc supports and provides input components and software technology to these smaller businesses. At the moment, IoT is a growth industry and for it to become successful there is a need to ensure that the IoT ecosystem is vast and supported.”
Ewald Fourie and Tiaan Coetsee, co-directors of IoTdc, had been looking for a partner to help them scale for some time. Fourie says, “we did a lot of due diligence on existing Partner Elite partners before concluding this deal. The resounding feedback was that the partnership would be like joining an all-inclusive family. And that is exactly what we have found to be true. This wasn’t a clinical, purely transactional arrangement. Of course, it also helped that they had significantly scaled many of their partners’ companies over the years.”
Based on Partner Elite’s extensive experience in helping businesses scale, Coetsee wholeheartedly agrees with Fourie. “When we met with Partner Elite we realized that they were the right people. Even before the ink was dry on our contract, the support was pouring in – market access, HR, and financial support to name a few,” he says.
Karoobos Investments director Nhlanhla Madalane says, “When looking to invest in IoTdc, my first and most important criteria was to look at the quality of the entrepreneurs. Once I was comfortable with that, I looked at the business case. In this instance, both boxes were ticked very quickly.”
According to Mark Walker, associate VP of information and communications technology market research firm IDC Middle East, Africa, and Turkey, the use of IoT in South Africa is expected to grow by 14% year on year between 2000 to 2025. IoT adoption is also predicted to increase exponentially across a range of sectors like the telecommunications, manufacturing, logistics, transport, agricultural, and government sectors.
