18 New Endeavor Entrepreneurs Selected in Stellenbosch

Against the backdrop of Stellenbosch’s wine country, Endeavor hosted its 105th in-person International Selection Panel from December 10–12, 2025. Entrepreneurs from across the globe came to pitch their businesses and engage in deep conversations with world-class panelists. After days of interviews, deliberations, and connection, Endeavor selected 18 entrepreneurs across 10 companies, including Endeavor’s first entrepreneur from Sudan.

Each ISP is the culmination of a rigorous, multi-step selection process to identify high-impact entrepreneurs from all over the world. We seek founders with the greatest growth potential and those who commit to reinvesting time and resources into their local entrepreneurial ecosystems. By doing so, they help build the next generation of entrepreneurs, sparking a Multiplier Effect™. During the ISP, our panelists interviewed entrepreneurs about their businesses and evaluated their potential for high-impact growth. The panelists then discuss the candidates and vote on whether to select them to become Endeavor Entrepreneurs.

Panelists

Thank you to our outstanding group of panelists:

Barry Swartzberg, Discovery Limited (Endeavor South Africa Board Chair); Diego Piacentini, View Different (Endeavor Global Ambassador, Endeavor Italy Board Member); Melvyn Lubega, Baobab Group; Go1 (Endeavor Entrepreneur, Endeavor South Africa Board Member); Nevzat Aydin, NA Kapital (Endeavor Entrepreneur, Endeavor Türkiye Board Member); Pieter de Villiers, Clickatell, Inc. (Endeavor Entrepreneur, Endeavor South Africa Board Member); Sergio Furio, Creditas (Endeavor Entrepreneur, Endeavor Brazil Board Member); Tjaart van der Walt, TYME (Endeavor Entrepreneur, Endeavor South Africa Board Member); Vital Laptenok, Flyer One Ventures (Endeavor Ukraine Board Chair); Daré Okoudjou, Onafriq (Endeavor Entrepreneur); Hassan Hamdan, Unifonic (Endeavor Entrepreneur); Katlego Maphai, Yoco (Endeavor Entrepreneur); LP Maurice, Busbud (Endeavor Entrepreneur); Lucy Hoffman, Carry1st (Endeavor Entrepreneur); Markus Bihler, Bihler Investments (Endeavor Entrepreneur); Miguel Santo Amaro, Coverflex (Endeavor Entrepreneur); Michael Heyink, Yellow (Endeavor Entrepreneur); Adrian Enthoven, Yellowwoods Ventures Investments; Drew McElroy, Transfix.

Our New Entrepreneurs

Learn more about the entrepreneurs and the innovative companies they are building.

Apero Technologies Group

Entrepreneurs: Tài Nguyễn, Tiệp Trần, Trung Nguyễn
Endeavor Office: Vietnam

What they do: Founded in 2020 in Vietnam, Apero Technologies Group (Apero) is a mobile app publisher and venture studio that develops and distributes a wide portfolio of consumer applications across productivity, AI, and gaming. With over 500 apps and more than 120 million active users per month, Apero has become a successful Southeast Asian technology exporter, ranking among the Top 20 non-gaming publishers globally and the Top 3 in Southeast Asia on Google Play. The company operates on a free-to-start model powered by advertisement, and combines in-house development with publishing and venture partnerships to create mobile apps that reach mass audiences across the globe.

Who they are: Apero’s three co-founders, Tài (CEO), Tiệp (COO), and Trung (CGO), met while working at Topica Edtech’s Founder-in-Residence (FIR) program, an incubator that has shaped many of Vietnam’s emerging tech entrepreneurs. Tài is a product-driven builder who started by making mobile games and later created Solvee AI, an AI-powered math tool, during FIR. Tiệp brings deep operations and growth experience, with a background in manufacturing management and leading user-growth marketing across Topica’s portfolio. Trung complements the team with senior mobile publishing and growth leadership, having gained experience as Senior Growth Manager at FUNTAP and Head of Growth at Edumall.

Cashi

Entrepreneur: Tarneem (Nina) Saeed
Endeavor Office: UAE

What they do: Founded in 2020, Cashi is a fintech firm building a digital payments network in Sudan, a market where cash-in/cash-out and bill-payment infrastructure are still weak. Cashi tackles these gaps with a merchant-focused POS device plus a mobile app that transforms merchants into local banking hubs, alongside the MyCashi consumer wallet. Through the platform, users can pay bills, send peer-to-peer transfers, and transact digitally where few alternatives exist. The company currently reports over two million registered users and 150,000 merchant agents.

Who they are: Tarneem (Nina) was born and raised in Khartoum, Sudan until her early teens, when she moved to Canada and the UK for education and work opportunities. After several years, she returned to Sudan to work for her family business, in the agriculture and national resources sector. This experience also convinced her of the great potential to build companies to help further digitize the economy of Sudan. In 2016, she founded AlSoug, which became Sudan’s largest online classifieds marketplace, helping users do anything from find jobs to buy cars. There, she recognized that many transactions were cash-based and payments infrastructure was weak, inspiring her to build Cashi.

Entrepreneur spotlight – Why we’re excited:

Much like her business, Tarneem (Nina) is resilient. She launched Cashi right before a 2023 coup plunged Sudan into conflict – closing banks, displacing people, and precipitating famine. She built Cashi to be at the forefront of financial infrastructure in frontier markets such as Sudan, where 85% of the population is unbanked. Its digital solutions address consumers’ everyday needs, reliably offering digital wallets, peer-to-peer payments, bill pay. Cashi’s selection underscores how entrepreneurship is even more important and can have significant impact in frontier markets.

Tarneem’s bold vision and ambition attests to this – we are excited to welcome her to the network and support her as she grows Cashi.

Jack Burgess
Analyst, Entrepreneur Selection

Ejari

Entrepreneurs: Yazeed Al-Shamsi, Khalid Almunif, and Fahad Albedah
Endeavor Office: Saudi Arabia

What they do: Founded in 2022, Ejari is a “rent now, pay later” service designed to address the tightening Saudi rental market, where the majority of contracts are annual and rental inflation has been at an all-time high. Ejari transforms the traditional leasing experience by renting units directly and subsequently re-leasing them with flexible monthly payment plans. The company leverages Saudi Arabia’s digital government infrastructure for KYC, credit data, and other key data points, allowing Ejari to offer instant, personalized quotes. The company has grown to over 15,000 users across the country.

Who they are: Ejari’s co-founders have known each other since childhood, combining complementary expertise across debt and capital markets, real estate, and product development. Yazeed (CEO) brings experience from capital markets, including roles in PE and IB at Mizuho and serving as a former lead specialist in establishing the Fixed Income and Structured Products Platform for the Saudi Exchange (Tadawul). Fahad (CTO) provides the technical and product execution expertise, having spent four years at the Saudi Exchange, specializing in application support and infrastructure architecture, and leveraging prior experience as a co-founder of a restaurant pre-ordering platform. Khalid (CCO) brings institutional real estate expertise, stemming from over five years as a Senior Associate in Real Estate Portfolio Management at the Saudi Public Investment Fund (PIF).

Genial Care

Entrepreneur: Kenny Laplante
Endeavor Office: Brazil

What they do: Founded in 2020, Genial Care is a vertically integrated, technology-enabled autism care network. Genial Care offers high-quality treatment for children with autism by combining physical clinics, proprietary clinical software, and a comprehensive therapist training platform. Its mission is to empower families and clinicians with innovative tools that accelerate child development and expand access to quality autism spectrum disorder therapy across Brazil.

Who they are: Kenny is an American entrepreneur who has lived in Brazil for eight years. His motivation is personal: he had a major speech delay as a child and benefited from speech therapy, and he has close family ties to autism. He started his career in investing at Credit Suisse and General Atlantic, focusing on healthcare and education, including behavioral health and autism-related ventures. Combining this background with his lived experience in Brazil, he saw a large unmet need and set out to build a scalable, tech-enabled autism care model.

Holywater

Entrepreneurs: Bogdan Nesvit and Anatolii Kasianov
Endeavor Office: Ukraine

What they do: Founded in 2020, Holywater is an AI-first entertainment network building and scaling next-generation content products across reading, interactive storytelling, and video. By combining proprietary AI technology with creative talent, Holywater transforms original IPs into multi-format franchises, from digital books to vertical video series, redefining how stories are created, distributed, and monetized. Operating at the forefront of the global micro-drama revolution — one of the fastest-growing segments in digital entertainment — Holywater competes in a market already exceeding $8.2B in annual revenue and growing 100x in app downloads over the past two years.

Who they are: Bogdan and Anatolii are two Ukrainian builders with complementary strengths in product, operations, and technology. Bogdan grew up in the Ukrainian industrial city of Kamianske, and later studied at Oxford and UCL before beginning his career at the United Nations, where he realized that entrepreneurship was the most effective way of having an impact. After a first startup failure and several years at Genesis, he founded the mobile app that would become Holywater and hired Anatolii as an early technical lead. Originally from Mariupol, Anatolii began coding at 14, left university to freelance as a developer, and joined Bogdan first as an iOS engineer before becoming the technical architect behind Holywater’s evolution. In his first month, he led the pivot to interactive storytelling, taught himself Unity, and shipped Holywater’s first story. Both founders now serve as Co-CEOs.

Entrepreneur spotlight – Why we’re excited:

Holywater’s founders bring a rare combination of exceptional creativity, sharp analytical rigor, and relentless customer-centricity to one of the most dynamic segments of the global content ecosystem. Their ability to pair artistic intuition with data-driven execution has fueled remarkable growth and positioned the company to shape the next frontier of content for emerging generations. Bogdan and Anatolii’s partnership reflects both vision and operational excellence. Holywater is capitalizing on a blue-ocean opportunity in Western markets by adapting and expanding a model that has already demonstrated significant success across Asia, where the category is far more developed.

We’re excited to welcome Holywater into the Endeavor network as a standout example of Ukraine’s entrepreneurial strength and as a company redefining how global content is created, consumed, and commercialized.

Carlota Entrecanales
Manager, Entrepreneur Selection

MedIQ

Entrepreneur: Dr. Saira Siddique
Endeavor Office: Pakistan

What they do: Founded in 2020, MedIQ is an integrated healthcare ecosystem connecting patients, providers, and payers. The company offers a suite of digital healthcare solutions including electronic health records (EHR), automated claims management, network management services, and more. MedIQ has scaled to 100+ cities and served over four million individuals across Pakistan. The company expanded to Saudi Arabia in 2023 to bring its services to the GCC region.

Who they are: Dr. Saira is a trained physician with two advanced degrees and over two decades of professional experience in the healthcare sector. Most recently, she worked as the Head of Emerging Markets at Allianz, the world’s largest insurance company, where she developed micro-health insurance products specifically tailored for emerging markets. MedIQ was born out of a personal health crisis experienced by Dr. Saira, who was left paralyzed and hospitalized for over a year. Through this experience, she encountered significant frustrations with the healthcare systems both in Pakistan and abroad, motivating her to launch MedIQ.

Entrepreneur spotlight – Why we’re excited:

Dr. Saira brings exceptional founder–market fit, combining decades of experience across healthcare delivery, insurance, and global markets. She has leveraged these insights to build a fast-growing business across two distinct geographies: Pakistan and Saudi Arabia. While many Pakistani-founded companies see the GCC region as a natural next step for international expansion, few achieve meaningful traction as quickly as MedIQ has in Saudi Arabia. This momentum underscores the strength of the company’s technology platform, its impact in addressing systemic healthcare challenges, and Dr. Saira’s ability to execute across diverse markets.

We’re excited to support MedIQ as a leading example of a female-founded regional success story emerging from Pakistan.

Jacob VanderZwaag
Senior Associate, Entrepreneur Selection

#Paid

Entrepreneur: Bryan Gold
Endeavor Office: Canada

What they do: Founded in Toronto in 2014, #Paid is a creator marketing platform that enables brands to collaborate with vetted content creators across Canada and the United States. The company’s platform is a marketplace for matching creators and brands at scale, unifying creator discovery, contracting and payment infrastructure, rights licensing, and analytics in a single system. As of 2024, over 100K content creators use #Paid to connect with brands.

Who they are: Bryan graduated from Western University where he majored in information and media studies. Initially intent on going into the film industry, Bryan witnessed one of his friends grow a fitness instagram account yet struggle to monetize their following. This inspired Bryan to launch #Paid, which he founded immediately after graduating.

Pineapple

Entrepreneurs: Marnus van Heerden, Matthew Elan Smith, Ndabenhle Junior
Ngulube, and Sizwe Ndlovu
Endeavor Office: South Africa

What they do: In South Africa, there is low insurance penetration, with first-time buyers and younger millennials facing high costs and opacity from traditional insurers. Founded in 2018, Pineapple is an insurtech company provider for millennials, allowing users to insure items and vehicles instantly via its mobile app, underwritten by Old Mutual Alternative Risk Transfer. Pineapple has top customer ranking and rapidly growing premium volumes, quickly becoming South Africa’s go-to vehicle and item insurance for younger generations.

Who they are: Pineapple’s four co-founders met at an innovation competition run by a global reinsurer. Matt’s background is in actuarial science and statistics, specialising in underwriting. Marnus has a background in accounting and law, having worked for several banks prior. Sizwe and Ndabenhle both have a background in software development. During the innovation competition, all four founders realized the lack of fair, accessible insurance options for young people in South Africa, inspiring them to create Pineapple.

Quibim

Entrepreneur: Ángel Alberich-Bayarri
Endeavor Office: Spain

What they do: Founded in 2012 with a commercial launch in 2021, Quibim is a med-tech startup that has built AI models to assist radiologists with image analysis. The company serves both large pharmaceuticals and life science companies through its QP-Insights database platform and individual hospitals through a mix of products designed for diagnosing specific types of cancer, including QP-Prostate, QP-Lung, QP-Breast, QP-Brain, and QP-Liver. Additionally, the company recently signed a partnership with Philips, a global MRI manufacturer, to integrate Quibim’s software in the company’s MRI machines around the world.

Who they are: Angel has dedicated his career to advancing medical imaging. Since completing his PhD in Biomedical Engineering from the Universitat Politècnica de València in 2010, Angel has been leading Quibim as CEO. He is also a board member at Startup Valencia, an organization dedicated to helping entrepreneurs from the Valencian region in Spain.

Watchmaker Genomics

Entrepreneur: Trey Foskett
Endeavor Office: Colorado – USA

What they do: Genomics, or the study of DNA, RNA, and epigenetic material, is transforming healthcare. By decoding genetic information, scientists can better diagnose diseases and pursue personalized treatments to enhance patient outcomes. Founded in 2019, Watchmaker Genomics is a life sciences company that develops high-performance enzymes, necessary tools for genomics research. By improving the quality of enzymes, the company aims to make genetic analysis more accurate and streamlined, even with challenging samples.

Who they are: Trey is a serial entrepreneur with a lifelong passion for biotechnology and advancing genomic science. In 2006, he co-founded Kapa Biosystems, a company focused on developing advanced enzyme solutions for PCR and next-generation sequencing (NGS). Trey successfully exited Kapa Biosystems to Roche, a leading multinational pharmaceutical company, for $500M in 2015. A few years later, Trey teamed up with co-founders Brian Kudlow and Stephen Picone — who both held leadership roles at ArcherDX, a precision oncology company acquired by Invitae for $1.4B — to start Watchmaker Genomics.

From building a digital payments network in Sudan to decoding genetic information, this month’s entrepreneurs reflect the bold ambition and global impact that define the Endeavor community.

Stay tuned for next month’s batch of high-growth entrepreneurs and change-makers.