Ben Botes

Caban Global Reach Private Equity LP

With 20+ years of experience in corporate finance and venture capital across Sub-Saharan Africa, I leverage my expertise to structure deals, optimize governance, and unlock growth for fintech ventures. As General Partner & Director at Caban Global Reach Fintech Fund, I guide founders on market expansion and capital strategy—driving innovation, inclusion, and strong investor returns.

General Partner

The Caban Group

The Caban Group is a group of companies formed to make an impact with entrepreneurs, civil society, environment and communities across Sub-Saharan Africa.

Group Managing Director

Gifftid

I’m joining Gifftid as a Board Advisor, supporting their mission to revolutionize charitable giving through innovative technology. Gifftid is redefining how generosity flows—making it easier, more transparent, and more impactful for individuals and organizations to give with purpose.

With my background in scaling businesses, impact investment, and transformative leadership, I look forward to working alongside the Gifftid team to drive strategic growth and expand their reach. The future of philanthropy is evolving, and I’m thrilled to be part of shaping it.

If you're passionate about leveraging technology for social impact, keep an eye on what’s coming next from Gifftid!

#AdvisoryBoard #ImpactInnovation #TechForGood #Leadership #ScalingImpact

Advisory Board Member

Digital Marketing Agency | 1st Content Digital

As the Co-Founder of 1stContent Digital, I oversee the agency's strategic direction and operations, ensuring we deliver tailored digital marketing solutions that drive measurable results for our clients. I work closely with teams to develop content marketing strategies, optimize SEO, design user-focused websites, and execute integrated marketing campaigns. My responsibilities also include collaborating with clients to understand their unique goals, crafting comprehensive marketing plans that align with their brand vision, and leveraging data-driven insights to refine and improve our services. My role is rooted in innovation and growth, consistently seeking ways to elevate our client’s digital presence.

Co-Founder

Brunel Business School

Associate Professor & Director of Skills Development

Coventry University London

As the Division Lead for Marketing at Coventry University, I have successfully managed a multidisciplinary team responsible for delivering a diverse array of courses to undergraduate, postgraduate students. Key responsibilities included the overseeing team management functions such as budgeting, recruitment, training and development, performance management, and rewards and remuneration. 
I played a pivotal role in developing new courses, including the MSc in Digital Marketing with Data Analytics, MSc Fintech, and MSc Entrepreneurship and Enterprise, aligning our curriculum with industry trends and student needs. I led the digitization of degree courses and their rollout on the Future Learn distance learning platform, enhancing accessibility and flexibility for our students.

Principle Lecturer & Division Lead - Marketing

SeedsLife Caban Impact Fund

SeedsLife Caban Impact Investment is an Impact Investment Fund supporting high growth companies and ventures in Sub-Sahara growth markets while creating positive social and environmental impact.

SeedsLife Investment Group

Seeds Life Investment Group LLp operates out of London as business seeking to leverage and enhance development opportunities in agriculture, biotech, mining and related industries in both the UK and beyond.

SeedsLife has a strong focus on Impact investing and utilises its resources, networks and capabilities to ensure that the communities targeted by its underlying assets are supported.

CEO SeedsLife Investment Group LLP

StartMe Crowdfunding

StartMe.co.za is crowdfunding platform and meeting place for South African Entrepreneurs and Investors. 

Current responsibilities: 

•Market development and industry evangelist.
•Brand development, web site traffic growth, web site revenue. Developed brand strategy and analytics systems.
•On-going PR, marketing and quality control of the StartMe! platform and content.
•Just about any and everything else to ensure the business gets off to a flying start.

CMO and Co-founder

New York University

Associate Lecturer

General Partner | Caban Global Reach • Building Operating Systems that Deliver Repeatable DPI in Fintech & Healthcare

I don’t believe in chasing deals.
I believe in designing outcomes.

With 31 years of experience across venture building, exits, and private equity, I’ve built and exited four businesses, scaled SaaS, fintech, and impact ventures across frontier markets, and now deploy capital as General Partner at Caban Global Reach and MD at Caban Group.

What differentiates my work is simple:
Deployment discipline → transforming capital into repeatable DPI, not one-off wins.
Operating systems → governance, cadence, and working-capital control that scale beyond founders.
Exit readiness → building liquidity pathways from day one, not as an afterthought.

What I do today:
• For founders: engineer clarity, commercial edge, and institutional discipline so they scale sustainably.
• For investors: originate proprietary deal flow, strengthen founder teams, and build governance that compounds trust and returns.

Philosophy:
The biggest risk isn’t failure.
It’s randomness.
That’s why the work isn’t speed — it’s discipline.

CMO & COO

📌 Every business is a mirror.
Look closely, and the truth is always there.

When you look at a company, you’re not just seeing revenue, culture, or systems. You’re seeing the leader — their clarity, their discipline, their blind spots.

Strong leaders project calm and focus, and the organisation compounds it. Chaotic leaders project confusion, and the business multiplies it. The reflection is never neutral.

If you want to know the future of a business, you don’t need to start with the market. Start with the person at the top.

👉 If your business is a mirror — what would it show today?

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From One to 1,660 — and What’s Next

In 2012, I built StartMe — Africa’s first crowdfunding platform.
Back then, there was no playbook. Regulators didn’t know what to do with it. Investors laughed it off. Founders thought it was too radical.

We built it anyway.

That one launch lit a spark.
Today, there are more than 1,600 platforms across Africa. From small school donation drives to equity platforms backing fintech scale-ups — the whole category exists because someone started.

But here’s the part I don’t want people to miss:
Crowdfunding wasn’t the destination.
It was proof.

Proof that Africa doesn’t need permission.
Proof that when traditional finance blocks the path, founders build new ones.

So the real question isn’t how far crowdfunding has come.
The real question is what’s next.

↳ What new models will shape Africa’s next decade of finance?
↳ How will founders and investors close the liquidity gaps still holding back scale?
↳ Where will the next “StartMe moment” come from — the one that rewrites capital access all over again?

We were first in 2012. But the frontier is still wide open.

👉 If you had to bet today, what’s the next frontier of alternative finance in Africa?

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Momentum without compounding is just drift.

Fast revenue spikes, rapid hires, or quick wins can look like progress — but if those gains don’t compound, they become friction. At scale, speed without structure burns resources instead of multiplying them.

The companies that endure aren’t the fastest movers. They’re the ones that design growth to stack, not scatter.

Three stress tests to see if you’re compounding or drifting:

1. Unit economics over time → Are new customers cheaper to acquire than the last, or more expensive?

2. Decision velocity → Is leadership making calls faster with scale, or slower?

3. Repeatability → Could the last six months of growth be achieved again without founder heroics?

If you fail these tests, more motion only means more drift.

True scale is not about chasing speed. It’s about building direction that compounds with every cycle.

👉 Where in your business have you seen speed disguise drift?

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Capital doesn’t solve broken models — it amplifies them.

At scale, money magnifies whatever is already in motion. Strong governance and repeatable systems accelerate. But weak foundations? They fracture faster under pressure.

I’ve watched companies raise at eye-watering valuations only to implode within 18 months. The market didn’t kill them. Their own cracks did.

Here are 3 early signs capital will make things worse:

1. Tightening cash cycles → Revenue comes in slower than expenses go out. More capital just shortens the runway to collapse.

2. Revolving-door hires → Leadership churn signals cultural fragility. Funding can mask it for a quarter, but not a year.

3. Fragile revenue → If growth depends on discounts, subsidies, or hero deals, scale only magnifies dependency.

Capital is an accelerant, not a cure. The wrong raise at the wrong time doesn’t just delay failure — it accelerates it.
The founders who scale sustainably are the ones who know when to raise, not just how much.

👉 Have you seen capital fix — or fracture — companies?

Governance isn’t a burden — it’s a multiplier.

When most founders hear governance, they think compliance, admin, and endless decks.

I used to feel the same.

But at scale, governance isn’t paperwork. It’s infrastructure for trust. It’s the system that tells investors your numbers mean something, that your team’s decisions aren’t guesswork, and that your company won’t collapse the moment you step away.

Here are 3 ways governance compounds growth — and the priorities to focus on:

1. Investor trust
↳ Your short-term priority: Build a one-page monthly dashboard with 3 lead metrics investors actually care about.
↳ Your medium-term priority: Institutionalise a quarterly reporting cadence that survives even when you’re not in the room.

2. Team alignment
↳ Your short-term priority: Start a weekly decision log that everyone can access.
↳ Your medium-term priority: Formalise a governance rhythm (ops forum, strategy council) so board meetings are for strategy — not firefighting.

3. Scale resilience
↳ Your short-term priority: Document the 3 most critical processes today — sales, cash flow, compliance.
↳ Your medium-term priority: Build a playbook that makes repeatability the norm, not the founder’s burden.

Bad governance strangles.

Good governance buys you time, trust, and headroom to scale.

👉 What has governance meant in your context?

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Growth without governance is speculation.

In frontier markets, too much capital has chased momentum instead of durability. Companies raise at record speed — only to stall because systems, trust, and repeatability weren’t built into the foundations.

This is what disciplined deployment solves. It’s not just about how much money is raised — but how, when, and where it’s deployed.

Here are three insights from our latest whitepaper:
Liquidity ≠ Growth
Liquidity is oxygen. But without governance, it fuels burn, not compounding.

Regulatory Trust Multiplies Growth
One aligned regulator compounds faster than ten new customers. Trust is the real accelerant.

Repeatability Beats Momentum
Heroic growth looks impressive in the short run. System-led growth is what creates exits.

Durability doesn’t come from raising more. It comes from deploying with discipline.

👉 I’ve unpacked this in a new whitepaper:

Unlocking Growth at the Frontier: How Private Equity Deploys Capital with Discipline in Emerging Markets

📖 Read it here: https://lnkd.in/eaKsPAWz

The hardest part of scaling isn’t markets, capital, or competition.

It’s the moment when the company grows — and the founder doesn’t.

Most businesses that stall at scale aren’t killed by bad products or poor timing. They’re held back because the founder stays in the same role while the company demands a new one. What once made them brilliant — being the operator, the hero, the visionary — now becomes the very thing that slows the business down.

This is what I call Inflection Point Leadership the identity shifts that separate founders who build a business from those who build an institution.

At every stage of scale, the role evolves. 

From doing → designing. 

From heroics → systems. 

From inspiration → translation. 

The founder who resists these shifts gets trapped in drift. The founder who embraces them builds something that compounds.

This isn’t about management hacks. It’s about identity.
And identity is the hardest thing to outgrow.

👉 Which shift feels hardest to embody right now?

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Inflection Point Leadership for Scale-ups

Most founders think scale breaks because of funding shortages.
It doesn’t.

Scale breaks when the flywheel doesn’t close.

In frontier markets, the real challenge isn’t building demand — it’s aligning the system around it. A fintech can hit 10x user growth and still stall because liquidity signals are missing. Or they attract capital, but without regulatory trust the engine seizes up.

That’s why governance + liquidity alignment accelerates frontier companies 3–5x faster. It’s not just about raising capital — it’s about sequencing the flywheel so each link reinforces the next.

Here’s where founders misinterpret the cycle:

↳ Market gaps look obvious → but they’re fragile if built on subsidies or hype.

↳ Capital fuels momentum → but the wrong signal attracts the wrong scrutiny.

↳ Regulatory approval feels binary → when in reality it’s an ongoing trust compact.

↳ Repeatability is assumed → but without system-led growth, exits collapse under founder heroics.

The flywheel isn’t a slide in your deck — it’s a stress test of whether your company is designed to compound.

Capital amplifies what’s already there. If your flywheel is broken, money makes it break faster.

👉 Where does your flywheel slow down — market, capital, trust, or repeatability?

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