My name is Alexandria.

I’m a South African startup founder, investor, government advisor and author based in Cape Town and London.

CAPE TOWN SOUTH AFRICA
LONDON UNITED KINGDOM

Upstart

I’m the founder and managing director of House of Pharos, a venture house comprised of a fund, studio, startup consultancy and venture content lab that was created following a UNDP strategy lab.

I founded DigsConnect, Africa’s largest student and coliving platform, which I started as an undergrad student at the University of Cape Town. I stepped down as CEO and Head of Product after running the company from inception for 6 years.

I’m a director of South Africa’s National Youth Development Agency, appointed by President Cyril Ramaphosa in 2021.

My second book, Upstart, was published in February 2024 and tells the story of how this all happened. It’s currently 8 on the best seller’s list in South Africa.

Press Coverage

House of Pharos

  • Pharos does consulting work with startups, funds, NGOs and government on all stages of the startup journey - preseed to scale-up.

    Please feel free to set up a meeting.

  • The Venture Capital arm of Pharos.

  • Pharos collaborates with other funds on deal flow and co-investments. Please feel free to reach out for a meeting.

  • With our partners, Pharos operates as venture studio, ideating on new startup ideas and rapidly iterating and validating the models and concepts before initiating a full build and rapid scaling.

    We also work with corporates on spinning out in-house company ventures into fully fledged businesses.

  • Pharos creates and produces educational, informative and entertaining content on all things venture and sustainable development related.

  • Every success shows us more things we want to do. It opens up bigger opportunities. Opportunities to take bigger risks. But that's natural. Do something hard and you want to do something harder. Accomplish that and you start seriously considering doing something impossible.

scream to go faster

scream to go faster