Sygnia founder and CEO Magda Wierzycka is launching a venture capital fund to invest in South African startups developing artificial intelligence tools, as she warns the country risks losing its best engineering talent and intellectual property to overseas investors.
Wierzycka, reported to be South Africa’s wealthiest self-made female billionaire, plans to formally announce the fund Monday. She aims to have it fully operational with seed capital within six months.
“Unless someone takes deliberate action to support South Africa’s intellectual capital with money, then all we are doing is exporting our best software engineers,” Wierzycka said. “We’ll end up importing the systems that will actually drive our economy going forward.”
Wierzycka said the problem is not a shortage of talent but a lack of structured local funding. She argued South Africa has the same intellectual capital available in countries like the United Kingdom and the United States, but that local startups are too often forced to seek financing abroad — frequently at a steep cost. “They will put $500,000 into the company, and suddenly they have the company,” she said of U.S.-based venture capital firms that have acquired stakes in South African startups.
The announcement comes after Wierzycka attended the World Economic Forum in Davos, where she said she came away troubled by the direction of AI development. “We’re building this agentic economy where effectively AI agents will take over running most of the tasks that we are used to performing ourselves,” she said.
Beyond providing funding, Sygnia plans to help startups obtain proper licensing, develop their marketing and convert concepts into viable business propositions. The company also plans to inject some of its own capital into the fund and host a structured national competition for AI startup founders to identify the most promising ideas.
Wierzycka first signaled her interest in local AI investment in her CEO’s report published in December 2025, in which she also confirmed she had returned to South Africa after seven years as a tax resident of the United Kingdom. She said recent tax changes in the UK were a factor in that decision but not the only one.
“The world has become deeply polarised — not only due to shifting geopolitical forces but also because of the accelerating race for AI dominance,” she wrote. “These seismic shifts in the global order force us to rethink where we can still make a meaningful difference.”
Her time abroad helped her identify what she described as a significant gap in South Africa’s venture capital ecosystem, despite the country having one of the youngest populations in the world. She has also advocated for requiring retirement funds to allocate a portion of their assets to venture investments as a way to strengthen the country’s innovation landscape.
Wierzycka and her team have grown Sygnia’s assets under management from 2 billion rand to 461 billion rand over the 20 years since the company’s founding. In 2025, the firm reported an after-tax profit of 383.2 million rand, a 10.4% increase over the prior year. The company is valued at roughly 5.22 billion rand, with Wierzycka holding more than half of its shares.
