Yoco has a new boss. On June 1, 2026, the South African payments company put German fintech executive Carsten Höltkemeyer in the CEO chair, according to a blog post on Yoco’s own site, closing a nine month stretch that began in September 2025, when co-founder Katlego Maphai stepped back from the role he’d held since day one.
It’s a bigger deal than it sounds. In eleven years, Yoco has never had an outside CEO every leader at the top has been one of the four people who built the thing. That changes now, at a moment when the company is reportedly worth roughly $700 million, per Techpoint Africa. Yoco has told Launch Base Africa that an IPO isn’t on the table “at this time.”
So who is the founder stepping out of that chair? Maphai spent a decade turning a card reading dongle into one of the more recognizable names in South African small business payments, and his path there says something about how patient fintech building in Africa actually has to be.
Who Is Katlego Maphai?
Maphai is one of South Africa’s better known fintech builders not a household name outside the industry, but a familiar one to anyone who’s followed payments in the country over the past decade. He started Yoco in 2013 with three friends, Carl Wazen, Bradley Wattrus, and Lungisa Matshoba, and ran it as CEO until stepping back in September 2025, per Yoco’s blog.
Education and Early Career
According to UCT News, the entrepreneurial bug bit early: a school trip with his parents to Palo Alto put him face to face with Silicon Valley’s optimism, and it stuck. He studied Business Science, majoring in Information Systems, at UCT, graduating in 2005, and landed his first job at Accenture’s communications and high tech consulting practice.
From there it was Delta Partners, a telecoms advisory firm, then Rocket Internet, where he worked on the launch of Jumia in Nigeria in 2012, per Empower Africa.
Why He Started Yoco
The idea, as Maphai has told it, came out of an ordinary moment. In 2012, at a small restaurant in San Francisco, he watched a friend pay for lunch with a portable card reader, the kind that plugs into a phone. Back home, he and his future co-founders noticed the gap: plenty of South Africans carried bank cards, but hardly any small businesses could accept them, mostly because banks made getting a card machine slow and expensive, according to the Daily Maverick.
Their fix borrowed from an industry none of them had worked in. Maphai has described the thinking as treating a card machine like a prepaid SIM, something you could just walk in and get, according to the Daily Maverick. Yoco ran its first transaction in October 2014, after roughly two years building the product and clearing regulatory hurdles, per UCT News not a smooth stretch.
South Africa’s payments industry is bank led, and getting a license meant convincing an institution to sponsor an unproven startup, something Maphai has said took about a year on its own, per the Fintech Leaders podcast. At one point, according to Ventureburn, the company had roughly a month of cash left before its first institutional funding round finally closed.
Growth, Funding, and Expansion
The funding did eventually come. Yoco closed a Series A in 2017 led by Quona Capital and Velocity Capital, per Ventureburn, then a $16 million Series B in 2018, and an $83 million Series C in 2021 led by Dragoneer Investment Group, with Partech, Breyer Capital, and 4DX Ventures also in, according to FinTech Futures. That’s $107 million raised altogether, the largest single fundraise by a South African payments company at the time.
By the time Maphai handed over the reins, Yoco had grown past card machines into online payments, point of sale software, and working capital, serving more than 200,000 merchants, according to Yoco and Disrupt Africa.
The Leadership Transition
Maphai’s explanation, laid out in Yoco’s blog post, was candid: the skills that start a company aren’t always the skills that scale it. Co-founders Matshoba and Wattrus stepped in as co-CEOs during the search for a permanent replacement, while Wazen kept running the commercial side.
That search landed on Höltkemeyer, who’d run Berlin based Solaris and, before that, spent a decade as Barclaycard Germany’s market CEO, per Yoco and Disrupt Africa. Matshoba and Wattrus then moved into chief product and technology officer and CFO roles, respectively, according to TechCentral. Maphai stays on as a co-founder focused on strategy, calling the appointment “a considered decision, made by all four of us,” per Yoco.
What He’s Said About Leadership
A few things come up again and again when Maphai talks about building Yoco. He’s been blunt, in comments to How We Made It In Africa, about the personal cost of entrepreneurship not the romanticized version, the actual toll. In interviews with Ventureburn, he’s talked about thinking in long time horizons, which he says changes how you process whatever’s currently going wrong. And per UCT News, his advice to younger entrepreneurs comes down to reading widely, not treating constraints as fixed, and expecting to fail along the way.
What Entrepreneurs Can Take From This
There’s a version of this story that’s mostly about funding rounds and valuation. The more useful one is about patience: years in consulting before founding anything, then years more clearing regulatory ground before the company processed a single transaction. There’s also the ending, where Maphai recognized, in his own words, that Yoco’s next stage needed different skills than his, and stepped back rather than holding on past the point where it made sense.
Conclusion
It’s tempting to file this under “fintech founder steps down” and leave it there. But Maphai’s decade at Yoco is a case study in how slowly financial access gets built in a market that wasn’t designed for small, informal businesses, and in what it looks like to hand that work off once it’s outgrown you. Yoco now serves over 200,000 merchants, many of them accepting electronic payments for the first time because of what he and his co-founders built.
FAQs
Who is Katlego Maphai?
A South African entrepreneur who co-founded Yoco in 2013 and ran it as CEO until stepping down in September 2025.
What is Yoco?
A South African fintech company offering card machines, point of sale software, online payments, and working capital, serving over 200,000 merchants, according to Yoco.
Why did Katlego Maphai start Yoco?
He and his co-founders noticed that few small businesses could accept card payments despite widespread card ownership, and built Yoco to make accepting cards as simple as buying a prepaid phone, per the Daily Maverick.
Is Katlego Maphai still CEO of Yoco?
No. He stepped down in September 2025, and Yoco appointed Carsten Höltkemeyer as his permanent successor, effective June 1, 2026, according to Yoco’s blog.
What can entrepreneurs learn from Katlego Maphai?
Mostly patience through long funding and regulatory timelines, honesty about what building a company actually costs, and a willingness to step back once someone else is better suited to lead.
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Isabella is a global business journalist and former McKinsey analyst from Brazil. She brings sharp insights on economic shifts, policies, and founder journeys from around the world.
