By Michelle Atagana: Managing Ed VentureBurn.
According to a SENS announcement, because we track those now, Knife Capital has officially been acquired by African Dawn Capital Limited, a listed entity.
“Shareholders are hereby advised that all the conditions precedent have been fulfilled and accordingly, the Knife Capital Acquisition will be implemented in accordance with the terms of the Agreement,” said the announcement today.
We reported on the possible acquisition last year when the first SENS announcement was made but it looks like things are moving along swiftly.
At its core, Africa Dawn Capital Limited provides various financial products and services to individuals and businesses in South Africa. The company offers bridging finance, personal short-term unsecured finance, micro finance, debtor discounting, structured property finance and other financial services, including commercial debt collection, debt advisory, debt management, run-offs and asset disposals, outsourcing, debt acquisition, and loan assistance.
We are not sure what the terms of the agreement are but here is what we know:
One-hundred percent of Knife will be the property of AfDawn, although we have it on good authority that the name of the company will remain the same. We also know that Knife was acquired for R10-million in a pure share deal. Currently AfDawn shares are at 8cents and the company is valued at R80-million, which gives Knife a 12% stake in the company.
We also know that the three co-founders of Knife will be part of the current board of AfDawn with their current shares.
It’s no secret that AfDawn has been wanting to get into the tech investment space and this helps get that going, as Knife has been investing in the tech space forever.
Here is what we don’t know:
How Knife’s current investments will play out: is it about to exit a bunch of businesses to start afresh or will the current companies come along for the ride?
How does this affect the HBD fund it currently manages?
The details of what this will mean for Knife initiatives — such as its recently launched Grindstone accelerator and its growth course with the University of Cape Town — are also still unclear.
It’s good news all round though.
Knife, previously PoweredbyVC, has been playing in the tech investment space for a while, managing tech billionaire Mark Shuttleworth’s South Africa VC investments — through HBD.
This is pretty cool for Knife because it has now circumvented that hassles of IPO and the troubles of getting listed. This does make fundraising to invest a tad easier but the Knife trio does have the hard task of helping get the AfDawn share price up.
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This article by Michelle Atagana was first published on Ventureburn here. Ventureburn is a TechMoran publishing partner.