Innovation City Cape Town

Innovation City Cape Town Home of Digital Innovation in the heart of Cape Town for startups, scaleups and corporates.

02/09/2026

Our phone footage while we wait for the official recap.📱 If you were there, you know. If you weren’t… next year. 👀

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Coming next year?📍🔥💫

This is the room you want to be in. ✨A full day of keynotes and panels from the women leading South Africa’s tech and bu...
21/08/2026

This is the room you want to be in. ✨

A full day of keynotes and panels from the women leading South Africa’s tech and business scene — real conversations, real insight, no fluff.

Digital Divas Summit. Tickets are limited. 🎤

đź“Ť Innovation City, Cape Town
đź—“ 28 August 2026

Link in bio to book your seat.

21/08/2026

Your career is shifting. AI is changing the way you work. Visibility matters more than ever. And ambition shouldn’t cost you your health.

Digital Divas 2026 brings all of these conversations into one room - with practical AI workflows, smarter financial tools, career reinvention, networking, LinkedIn strategy, women’s health, sustainable ambition and honest insight from women leading through change.

Come for the ideas. Leave with useful tools, stronger connections and a clearer sense of what comes next.

28 August | Innovation City, Cape Town

We’re almost sold out. Book one of the final tickets now.

Digital Divas Summit is back, and this year we’re going even bigger. ✨A full day of bold conversations, powerful women, ...
19/08/2026

Digital Divas Summit is back, and this year we’re going even bigger. ✨

A full day of bold conversations, powerful women, and unforgettable moments - including Diva Pitch, where real founders take the stage to pitch their business live to the room. 🎤

🔥 Limited seats available
đź“Ť Innovation City, Cape Town
đź—“ 28 August

If last year inspired you, this year will ignite you.

Link in bio to book your seat before they’re gone.

Great connections, full glasses, and the perfect mix of familiar faces and new ones. This month’s Member Meet-Up was exa...
07/08/2026

Great connections, full glasses, and the perfect mix of familiar faces and new ones. This month’s Member Meet-Up was exactly what it’s meant to be: no agendas, no pitch decks, just the Innovation City community catching up over cocktails. It honestly felt like the perfect warm-up for First Thursday.

A huge thank you to everyone who came through!🥂

Want to be at the next one? Apply to become a member here: https://www.innovationcity.co.za/memberships

A full house for our AI & Thai event! 🍜🤖Hosted with our brilliant Food for Thought event series partner, Finance Isle of...
31/07/2026

A full house for our AI & Thai event! 🍜🤖

Hosted with our brilliant Food for Thought event series partner, Finance Isle of Man, the masterclass with Daniel Navarro, Co-Founder and COO of Pomodor, delivered a very clear message:

Cold outreach isn’t broken because people don’t want to buy. It’s broken because too much of it is generic, poorly timed and barely personal at all.

A few of our biggest takeaways:

🧠 A chatbot talks. An agent does. AI agents combine a brain to reason, skills to perform repeatable tasks and connectors that allow them to work across tools such as Gmail and Slack.

🎯 Personalisation is more than a first name. Good outreach uses genuine context: the person’s role, the problems their business may be facing and a relevant reason to start a conversation.

⚙️ Agents can handle the heavy lifting. They can research prospects, enrich and score leads, draft personalised emails, send them for approval and keep systems updated.

đź‘€ Humans still belong in the loop. The best systems place approval points where they matter, ensuring teams retain control over who is contacted and what is sent.

🚀 You don’t need a huge tech stack to start. Daniel showed how a practical outreach agent can be built with just a few connected tools and scaled as the business grows.

Download Daniel’s presentation here: https://lnkd.in/dmH4Kjeg

Thank you to everyone who packed Innovation City for the session. 🙌
Cape Town is clearly ready to move beyond talking about AI agents - and start putting them to work!

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📢 NEW EVENT ALERT!!!Who actually gets access to the financial system and who doesn’t?That question is sitting underneath...
30/04/2026

📢 NEW EVENT ALERT!!!

Who actually gets access to the financial system and who doesn’t?

That question is sitting underneath a lot of what’s happening in fintech right now.

As fraud gets more sophisticated and regulation struggles to keep up, identity is no longer just a compliance step - it’s the gateway to participation.

Next up at Innovation City Cape Town, in partnership with :
“The Great Unbanking Debate: Identity, Access & Trust in African Markets”

A curated, high-signal room of fintech operators, banks, and platform builders getting into what’s actually breaking, and what it takes to scale without locking out legitimate users.

No fluff. Just the realities:
đź’ˇ Where identity systems are failing
đź’ˇ How trust is being built in real time
đź’ˇ What inclusion actually looks like at scale

If you’re building in fintech, platforms, or anything that depends on trust at scale, this is one to be in the room for!

Request to join
đź”—Link in bio

🥂 Bubbly, Networking, and a Reality Check on AIOur recent session, “Bots and Bubbles: How AI Is Rewiring Financial Servi...
24/04/2026

🥂 Bubbly, Networking, and a Reality Check on AI

Our recent session, “Bots and Bubbles: How AI Is Rewiring Financial Services,” hosted by Finance Isle of Man at Innovation City Cape Town, moved past the hype to look at the actual infrastructure of the continent’s economy.

We started the evening with a glass of bubbly and some great networking, but the conversation quickly turned to the “engine room” of finance.

The biggest takeaway? AI is a revolution, not an evolution. As our panel pointed out, trying to fit AI into legacy systems is like trying to make a horse run faster when the automobile has already arrived. Sometimes, you have to obliterate the old to build the new.

đź’ˇ 4 Key Insights from the Room:

🌍 The African Complexity: Unlike Brazil or India with single regulators, Africa’s 1.4 billion people are spread across 54 countries. Navigating this regulatory fragmentation is the ultimate AI challenge.

🏗️ Infrastructure is Non-Negotiable: We can’t just talk about models; we have to talk about compute power. Building local data centers is the only way to move from “consuming” AI to “building” it.

🔒 Policy as a Competitive Edge: The winners won’t be the companies rushing blindly into AI, but those who are “cautiously optimistic,” defining strict policies on data cleanliness and model ethics.

🛡️ The Speed of Risk: Traditional 2-day security patching is dead. AI-powered threats move instantly, meaning our defense systems must now be as fast as the attackers.

🎤 The Panel
A massive thank you to all who attended, especially our experts Mpho Sadiki (), Thalia Pillay (Orca Fraud) and amazing moderator Mladen Čolić ( Africa), for the candid “Food for Thought!”

🚀 Unlocking SA’s Invisible Economy: Key TakeawaysSouth Africa’s financial landscape is shifting, and the “invisible econ...
17/04/2026

🚀 Unlocking SA’s Invisible Economy: Key Takeaways

South Africa’s financial landscape is shifting, and the “invisible economy” is finally becoming visible. 

We recently hosted a powerhouse session, “Financial Inclusion 2.0: Unlocking SA’s Invisible Economy,” where we dove deep into how fintech innovation, alternative data, and a retail-led banking revolution are redrawing the lines of financial access.

A massive thank you to our expert panel for their sharp insights:
Benito Mable (CEO, )
Idan Jaan (Co-Founder & COO, )
Patrick Postrehovsky (GM, Zazu)
Superbly led by Jaco Van Jaarsveldt (Chief Strategy & Innovation Officer, SA)

And of course, thank you to everyone who attended and contributed to the vibrant discussion!

➡️ Here are our 5 Game-Changing Insights from the Session:

1. The MSME Funding Gap is a Crisis 📉
 85% of applicants earn under R1M. Current regulations make them “too complex” for big banks, leaving the economy’s backbone underserved.

2. Retailers are the New Banking Giants 🛒
Retailers and agile players are winning. Their real-time point-of-sale and loyalty data beats outdated credit reports.

3.  From “Thin-File” to “Data-Rich” 📊
Transaction history is the new gold standard. 13 months of on-time subscriptions prove reliability better than a traditional score.

4. The Death of Vehicle Ownership? 🚗
The youth are ditching 72-month loans for mobility subscriptions. Freedom of access is officially replacing the “pride of ownership.”

5. Open Banking: The 5-Year Lag 🔓
We need standardised APIs. To drive inclusion, we must turn fragmented data into seamless financial intelligence.

The Bottom Line: Financial inclusion is about recognising the value in existing behaviour. The data is there—we just need the tools to use it. 💡

🚨 NEW EVENT ALERT 📢Bots and Bubbles: How AI Is Rewiring Financial Services 📍 Innovation City Cape Town🗓️ 23 April | 17h3...
14/04/2026

🚨 NEW EVENT ALERT 📢

Bots and Bubbles: How AI Is Rewiring Financial Services
đź“Ť Innovation City Cape Town
🗓️ 23 April | 17h30–19h00
đź’ˇ Brought to you by

AI isn’t the future of finance - it’s the current infrastructure! 🤖

From fraud detection to payment flows, machine learning has moved out of the lab and into the stack.

Join us and Finance Isle of Man for a candid “Food for Thought” panel on how AI is practically reshaping risk, trust, and digital security.

We’ll interrogate where AI is already embedded beyond the pilot phase, how risk models are evolving, and the critical relationship between regulation and trust. This session is designed for fintech leaders and policymakers to pinpoint what to prioritize as AI becomes the backbone of digital commerce.

…and yes, there will be complimentary networking bubbly! 🥂

Featuring:
🎤 Mpho Sadiki – MD for Merchant Services, Africa: Payfast by Network
🎤 Thalia Pillay – Co-Founder: Orca Fraud
🎤 Mladen Colic – Head of FinTech: TransUnion Africa

🎟️ Seats are limited.
đź”—Link in bio

Address

Darter Studios, Longkloof, Darter Road
Cape Town
8001

Opening Hours

Monday 09:00 - 17:00
Tuesday 09:00 - 17:30
Wednesday 09:00 - 17:00
Thursday 09:00 - 17:00
Friday 09:00 - 17:00
Saturday 09:00 - 17:00
Sunday 09:00 - 05:00

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