We back it. We build it.
Some businesses we do not want to advise from a distance: we want to own a piece of them. Pivot Ventures is how we do that: we take equity, sit on the operating side, and put our engineering team inside the company. Same offices. Same Slack. Same problems.
We co-build the product, run technology and operations, and stay close to the founders.
We back businesses where AI makes the product materially better, in categories we understand, with teams we want to build alongside. Same operators, builders and engineers as our advisory work, different commercial relationship: we stay on the inside and hold a stake in the outcome.
Portfolio companies
Port2Port
Port2Port is South Africa’s leading online wine and spirits marketplace, carrying over 3,500 SKUs from 200 vendors and shipping worldwide straight from the source. Nicolò co-founded the business in 2015. Distell invested in 2019 and exited in 2024, when Pivot Ventures took a stake. Amber-Rose Mostert became Chief Executive in March 2026. The two engineers running the platform are the ones who built it: Gerhard Olivier was its Chief Technology Officer and Chris Viljoen spent seven years on its systems. In August 2026 we shipped Hybrid Search across the catalogue.
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CellarMe
Launched in 2025. A visitor at a cellar door buys in their own currency and the wine ships to their door, wherever they live. CellarMe now sells directly into 30 markets from cellar doors in South Africa, Europe and New Zealand. We built the platform end to end and run it with the founding team.
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