Sygnia founder and CEO Magda Wirzicka 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 foreign investors.
Wierzyka, said to be South Africa's wealthiest self-made female billionaire, plans to formally announce the fund on Monday. They aim to make it fully operational with initial capital within six months.
“Unless someone takes deliberate action to support South Africa's intellectual capital with money, we are only exporting our best software engineers,” Wierzycka said. “We will eventually import the systems that will actually drive our economy forward.”
Wierzycka said the problem is not a lack of talent but a lack of structured local funding. He argued that South Africa has similar intellectual capital available to countries such as the United Kingdom and the United States, but local startups are often forced to seek financing abroad – often at enormous cost. “They'll put $500,000 into the company and suddenly they own the company,” he said of US-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 most of the tasks that we're used to doing ourselves,” he said.
In addition to providing funding, Sygnia plans to help startups obtain appropriate licenses, develop their marketing, and turn concepts into viable business propositions. The company also plans to put some of its capital into the fund and host a structured national competition for AI startup founders to identify the most promising ideas.
Wierzycka first indicated her interest in local AI investment in her CEO report published in December 2025, in which she also confirmed that she had returned to South Africa after seven years as a United Kingdom tax resident. He said recent tax changes in the UK were a factor in that decision, but not the only one.
“The world has become deeply polarized – not only because of changing geopolitical forces, but also because of the growing race for AI dominance,” they wrote. “These seismic shifts in the global system force us to rethink where we can still make meaningful change.”
His time abroad helped him identify what a significant gap there was in South Africa's venture capital ecosystem, despite the country having one of the youngest populations in the world. He has also advocated the need for retirement funds to allocate a portion of their assets to venture investments as a way of strengthening the country's innovation landscape.
Wierzycka and his team have grown Sygnia's assets under management from 2 billion rand to 461 billion rand in the 20 years since the company was founded. In 2025, the firm reported a post-tax profit of 383.2 million rand, up 10.4% from the previous year. The company is valued at about 5.22 billion rand, with Wierzyca holding more than half of its shares.