Magda Wierzycka, founder and CEO of Sygnia, SA’s second-largest asset management company, is to launch a venture capital fund investing in SA entrepreneurs who are building AI-based architecture.
“We have the same intellectual capital in SA as the UK or US, but no structured capital behind it,” she says. “We are allowing founders of AI startups to leave SA and take their intellectual property with them.”
Wierzycka has just returned from the UK, where she ran a venture capital business investing in startups for six years. The launch of the new fund will be announced this week.
“South Africans are building things here, inventing concepts, but don’t have capital behind them, so they make their proposals to offshore venture capital funds.”
The dangers and disadvantages of AI far outweigh the advantages to humanity, she says.
“We’re building an agentic economy where AI agents will take over running most of the tasks we are used to performing.”
But much as she wants to press “delete” and say “no” to AI companies, it’s not going to happen.
“So we are launching a venture capital fund. Unless someone takes deliberate action ... we [will keep] exporting our best software engineers.”
“We’re going to run a very structured national competition where we want the founders of these small businesses to compete, obviously in a very private, NDA [nondisclosure agreement] space, with ideas and with technical talent, and we will select from those ideas.”
There’s no time to waste, she says. She wants the fund up and running, seeded with capital, within the next six months.
“It’s not just about throwing money at these startups. We will show the founders how to become companies, how to get the proper licensing, how to market themselves, how to turn the concepts they have into tangible propositions.
“We bring business experience skills to the table, they bring their ideas and innovation.”
“AI is going to lead to massive labour displacement. Massive. But it’s going to happen in white-collar jobs.
“There’s a difference between robotics in manufacturing and AI-driven technologies being implemented in the legal and accounting professions, finance and so on.”
In terms of job displacement, people will have to learn new skills, reskill themselves and then adapt and adopt.
“There are so many opportunities, and South Africa is nowhere. AI is a necessity. It’s not a case of ‘should we be doing it?’ We must be doing it.” - Business Times
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