Thandwefika Radebe

Co-Founder at Qwili

Speaker

Thandwe Radebe is the co-founder of Qwili, a start-up that provide’s a downloadable storefront offering digital and physical products. They’ve simplified the journey to starting a business for people that don't earn enough to support themselves. They’ve done this by minimizing startup costs to just $3 and made it easy for micro entrepreneurs to advertise to their customers. Their curated distribution network targets offline, low-income consumers and their entrepreneurs act as a trust bridge to reaching these hard to reach consumers. The combination of their platform and their network of re-sellers enable them to reach hard to reach consumers.. Founded in 2020, the platform has over 4,800 monthly active entrepreneurs and has grown revenue 8 fold in the past year.

Qwili has raised a total of $2.7m, which will enable the company to onboard 20K merchants in the next 6 months.

Before Qwili Thandwe built an NPO called Phaphama that took the brightest minds at South Africa's universities and paired them with survivalists entrepreneurs living in the informal areas of South Africa. To date Phaphama has assisted over 200 SMME's in South Africa's informal areas and has deployed over $100k in funding. Thandwe was also the head of Duracell Batteries Southern African business.