Matt will probably claim to have started the business in his garage as the best tech entrepreneurs do, but we doubt that he could’ve afforded one at the time. He ran Webafrica until handing it over to current CEO Tim Wyatt-Gunning in 2011 – by which the company was already turning over R100m+, with over 20 000 customers.
Matt is also a shareholder and founder of Teraco (2007), the first provider of vendor-neutral centre colocation in South Africa, and Paperjet (2012).
Rupert was not a model student and preferred designing websites in the comfort of his bedroom to the wooden seats of the classroom. After giving up the life of academics to join Matt in co-founding Webafrica, he was appointed COO. After the realisation that he might be in danger of spending his entire life in one office, Rupert handed over the reigns in 2013 to join his brother, Oli, in setting up an online destination management business, Accommodation Direct, which is already showing signs of being another success story.
Rupert was recently voted by Forbes as one of Africa’s top 30 young entrepreneurs to watch.
The key to the company’s success is understanding its customers’ needs and providing them with world-class services.
Webafrica, under the leadership of CEO Tim Wyatt-Gunning, is all about reliable web services to customers, many of whom have been dealing with us from the beginning.
Tim joined Webafrica as CEO in 2011. English by birth and an unfortunate accent, otherwise South African, Tim has lived in Cape Town since 1998. He came to SA to found and build Storm Telecom with Tim Parsonson, which they sold to Vox Telecom in 2008, with revenues of R208m and almost 200 staff situated across the country. After a couple of years of dabbling in non-IT related start-ups, Tim realised he wasn’t very good at much else, so grabbed the opportunity with both hands to invest in and run Webafrica – and has never looked back.
He’s a people person and spends most his time persuading Webafricans that the key to the company’s success is understanding its customers’ needs and providing them with world-class service.
From CEO’s in Cape Town and mechanics in Midrand to students in Stellenbosch, we aim to please our clients, whoever they may be. Our wide range of professional products and services plus our dedication to customer services have been the key ingredients to our success over the last 20 years.
We’re not into bragging (and we’re obviously biased), but a quick Google search will reveal that the majority of people who select Webafrica as their ISP of choice are pretty happy campers.
Everything. Well, not quite. We don’t build RDP houses or hand-stitch our own hipster doilies. But when it comes to the internet, Webafrica is your one-stop web shop. We bring you to the web and the web to you in a way that we think you’d appreciate. How? From expertly designed websites and world-class internet to easy hosting and water-tight security, everything we do is characterised by excellent service and Mzansi-friendly prices.
Want to work here? We’re always hiring. Check out our vacant positions on our Careers Page.
When it comes to the web, we’ve got you covered. Our ADSL and VDSL is speedy, and our fibre is even faster (up to 100 Mbps!). There’s a prepaid ADSL option for those pay-as-you-go fans. Plus, if you’re looking for help getting your Telkom line setup, or want to move your website hosting to us, we can sort those details out for you too. We’ll even preconfigure and ship your router to you.
On the hosting front, we’ve got easy, flexible cloud-based VPS (Virtual Private Servers) as well as shared and private options – each is available in a suite of packages designed to suit your needs.
We also take the hassle out of creating, hosting and maintaining your website. Having your website designed by us gets you a clean, business-focused website created by our expert team of copywriters and designers – all of this in just two weeks.
As for resellers, our innovative Virtual ISP programme means that sharing the Webafrica love – and success – has never been easier.
Nick Zografos
Chairman
Tim Wyatt-Gunning
Chief Executive Officer
Tim Parsonson
Non-Executive Director
Thomas Vollrath
Non-Executive Director
Nick invested in Webafrica in 2009, personally and through his business Smartcom. As chairman until 2015, he guided Matt and Ru to concentrate on establishing proper processes and practices which entrepreneurs occasionally overlook.
Nick is a rare breed of accountant/salesman. He spent five years in financial and executive roles in South Africa's telecommunications sector after completing his auditing articles with Price Waterhouse in 1994.
In 2000 he founded Smartcom, a cellular service provider that formed a subsidiary of Vodacom, where he is still CEO.
Webafrica, under the leadership of CEO Tim Wyatt-Gunning, is all about reliable web services to customers, many of whom have been dealing with us from the beginning.
Tim joined Webafrica as CEO in 2011. English by birth and an unfortunate accent, otherwise South African, Tim has lived in Cape Town since 1998. He came to SA to found and build Storm Telecom with Tim Parsonson, which they sold to Vox Telecom in 2008, with revenues of R208m and almost 200 staff situated across the country. After a couple of years of dabbling in non-IT related start-ups, Tim realised he wasn’t very good at much else, so grabbed the opportunity with both hands to invest in and run Webafrica – and has never looked back.
He’s a people person and spends most his time persuading Webafricans that the key to the company’s success is understanding its customers’ needs and providing them with world-class service.Tim has been a non-exec director of Webafrica since 2008.
Together with Matt, they hatched the very successful Teraco data centre plan, which Tim went on to run until 2014.
Before Teraco, Tim co-founded and ran Storm Telecom with the other Tim from 1998 to 2008. In his youth, he studied maths at Cambridge University before becoming a management consultant with Coba MID. From there he founded the European business of LDI, and an American telecoms business, in 1996, before joining Tim W-G in 1998 to set up Storm Telecom in South Africa.
Like many old people, he has recently returned to his roots to live in Cambridge, where he rubs shoulders with clever people while acting as an angel investor for several tech start-ups.
Thomas Vollrath joined the Webafrica board as a non-executive director in July 2015.
Thomas is a German-born hosting and web services guru who lives in England but has recently caught the South Africa bug.
He drove the meteoric growth of two of Europe’s most successful hosting companies, as CEO of United Internet, and more recently as CEO of Host Europe Group. He left HEG in 2013 when it was sold to a private equity business for £400m. We persuaded him to come to Cape Town to check us out. He liked what he saw, made a substantial investment in us, and we’re delighted to have him on our board.
He has come on board to help us get into the right markets with the right products and be the best at what we do, with a particular focus on ensuring SMEs benefit from Webafrica's expanding portfolio of web services. Since he joined, we have already benefited from his introductions to several leading global suppliers in our industry.
He also did his schoolwork, with an MBA from Long Island University in New York and a BA in International Business Management from Franklin University in Switzerland.
Thomas is also an angel investor and strategic advisor to a select number of companies in the digital sector.
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